A literary argument delivered aloud

In the individual oral (IO), you discuss how two studied literary works present a global issue through what they depict and how they are written. This discussion is assessed. The guide sets out the task as follows:

Examine the ways in which the global issue of your choice is presented through the content and form of two of the works that you have studied.

You're not giving a speech about a social problem with literary examples attached. Your job is to interpret the works. What perspective does each offer on the issue? How do the writer’s choices construct that perspective?

Content covers the situations, relationships, experiences and ideas represented in a work. Form covers how the writer shapes these through literary form, language, structure and technique. The two belong together. A character’s exclusion is content; restricting that character’s opportunities to speak is a formal choice that can make the exclusion perceptible.

The assessment arrangement

You have 15 minutes for the IO: 10 minutes of student delivery, then 5 minutes of teacher questions. You speak in the language A studied. Both levels have the same requirements and assessment criteria, but the IO contributes 30% at SL and 20% at HL to the final result.

Your teacher assesses the oral; the IB moderates it externally. The assessment must take place somewhere suitably quiet because a clear audio recording is required.

Two works, two extracts, one issue

Choose two works taught on your course: one originally written in English and one originally written in another language and studied in English translation. A pair of English-language originals won't meet the requirement. Neither will two translated works.

Take one extract from each work. The diagram below shows how the task works: one global issue connects the two works, and each extract gives you a way to examine the writer’s choices within the larger work.

Each extract must:

• Be continuous, with no cuts or inserted ellipses.
• Contain no more than 40 lines; where counting lines is unsuitable, contain an amount you can analyse closely in the available time.
• Clearly reveal the chosen global issue and provide worthwhile authorial choices to discuss.
• Identify its source, including the work and author.

You may use a complete short text as an extract, but you cannot combine several separate texts. When an extract comes from a collection studied as a work, you must also discuss relevant features of the broader collection. Don't choose a passage simply because it's convenient: you need to explain why it matters to your interpretation of the work.

Give your teacher the extracts for approval at least one week before the assessment. You may take only clean, unannotated copies of the extracts and the official outline into the room. That outline may contain a maximum of 10 brief bullet points. Use it to support your speaking, not as a script to read aloud.

What the assessment rewards

Four criteria assess the IO. Each is worth 10 marks, for a total of 40 marks.

The criteria are connected, but they reward distinct achievements. Knowing what happens isn't the same as explaining how meaning is made. Nor does naming a technique, by itself, establish a persuasive interpretation.

Your work, with appropriate support

The oral must be your own intellectual work. Your teacher may discuss whether your choices are suitable, guide your preparation and comment on your outline. They must not choose your topic or rehearse the actual assessed oral with you. You may practise with different works and issues. Memorizing a complete speech is discouraged because it can weaken genuine communication.

You and your teacher must both confirm authenticity. Once you have completed the assessed oral at the school’s designated time, you cannot redo it; after submission, you cannot withdraw it. Works used for the IO cannot be used in another assessment component. The same material cannot also fulfil extended essay requirements.

To begin preparing, record your proposed issue and the two eligible works. For each extract, note why it opens onto the larger work. This gives you a defensible reason for choosing the pairing, rather than just a possible combination.

What makes an issue global?

The guide gives three properties of a global issue:

• “It has significance on a wide/large scale.”
• “It is transnational.”
• “Its impact is felt in everyday local contexts.”

Your issue must matter beyond one setting. It must also be visible in particular people’s everyday experiences.

A literary work need not depict several countries for its issue to be transnational. Even a single household, workplace or community can reveal a problem that operates across national boundaries. Nor does a large historical event automatically make a suitable issue. You still need to identify the concern the works explore and show how it affects lived experience.

Fields of inquiry are starting points

The guide offers five overlapping fields, not five ready-made oral topics. Use their breadth to find possibilities, then narrow your final issue.

An issue can cross fields. Rather than deciding which heading owns it, ask whether you have defined its scope precisely and whether both works support it.

Move from a subject to a specific concern

A broad subject names an area. A useful issue goes further: it identifies a consequential relationship within that area. In this invented planning example, the focus narrows from technology, to workplace surveillance, to the erosion of personal autonomy through workplace surveillance. The diagram shows those stages.

The final wording identifies a practice and its effect, along with the people affected. There’s still room for different perspectives. One work might expose overt coercion; another might show people accepting surveillance as reassurance. Don’t build your conclusion into the issue so rigidly that both works have to deliver an identical message.

Global scale is a condition for selecting the issue, not a reason to fill the oral with general background. Discuss the aspects actually presented in your chosen works.

Let the works test the wording

Start with your learner portfolio. Revisit passages and recurring concerns, looking again at links you have noticed between works. Although the portfolio is not separately assessed, it records how your interpretation develops. Keep track of possible issues and connections between works. Record significant passages, too, along with changes in your issue’s definition and difficulties in your preparation.

For each possible pairing, establish three things:

• Presence: the issue is clearly evidenced in both extracts and both larger works.
• Craft: each work gives you enough specific authorial choices to analyse its presentation.
• Scope: the issue can be explored meaningfully in 10 minutes, with approximately equal attention to the two works.

Don’t force a preferred issue onto a passage that only faintly relates to it. Choosing one rich work and one thin companion simply because both mention the same subject is another trap.

Write your issue as a precise phrase. Then add a separate sentence for each work explaining its particular perspective. If those sentences rely on textual choices rather than general claims about society, you have a workable basis for the oral.

Organize an argument, not a tour of techniques

Your structure should help the listener follow your interpretation. Make the global issue clear, then show how each work presents it. The evidence needs to connect your claims to the writers’ choices.

The guide requires balance and coherence; it does not prescribe a sequence of sections. Give approximately equal attention to both works, with meaningful attention to the extracts as well as the larger works. You don’t need identical numbers of quotations or techniques. Neither work, and neither scale of analysis, should be left underdeveloped.

A work-by-work structure

One straightforward approach is to establish the issue, build an argument about each work in turn and then bring the findings together. The timeline below offers a possible allocation, not an official timing formula: 1 minute for the opening, 4 minutes for Work A, 4 minutes for Work B and 1 minute for the conclusion.

In the opening, name the issue and identify both works and their authors. Briefly locate the extracts and state your central interpretation. Give enough context to orient the listener without slipping into a compressed plot summary.

As you discuss each work, move between the extract and relevant features of the larger work. You might start with a precise choice in the extract and explain its effect. Then show how a recurring pattern or a structural development elsewhere extends or complicates that effect. Be selective. An additional scene earns its place only if it develops the argument.

Use the conclusion to state what your analysis has established about how the works present the issue. Simply repeating the issue’s wording, or announcing that both writers use techniques, does not do that job.

An issue-led structure

You could instead organize the discussion around aspects of the issue, bringing both works into each part. An invented plan on workplace surveillance, for example, could move from institutional control to internalized self-monitoring.

Explicit comparison can clarify differences in perspective. But the IO is not a Paper 2 comparative essay: its central responsibility is to analyse how each work presents the global issue. Choose whichever structure lets you treat your evidence most clearly and sustain that analysis.

Build the links inside the structure

At each analytical step, make a claim about the issue and support it with precise textual evidence. Explain the authorial choice, then interpret its significance. Calling a choice effective is not enough for evaluation. Explain what particular understanding of the issue that choice enables or complicates.

For example, imagine an invented scene in which a supervisor repeatedly interrupts a worker’s account. You could write: “By allowing the supervisor to break off the worker’s explanations, the dramatist makes control operate through the conversation itself, presenting the loss of autonomy as an everyday restriction on whose account can be heard.” The sentence connects dramatic form to the issue instead of just identifying interruptions.

Use transitions to explain how ideas relate. When moving from an extract to the larger work, you might show how something repeats, develops or contradicts what you have already analysed. A transition to the second work might introduce a different source of pressure or a different response to it.

Structure for speaking and responding

Turn your plan into no more than 10 short outline bullets. Each bullet should have an argumentative purpose and a compact evidence cue, not sentences for you to recite. Keep your spoken language clear and appropriately formal. Pauses and signposting help the listener hear the reasoning.

After the 10-minute delivery, the teacher’s 5 minutes of questions explore your understanding and analysis further. Listen to the specific question being asked. Extend the relevant claim, substantiate it or qualify it, rather than automatically returning to a memorized sequence.

To complete the plan, assign a claim to each main section, supported by extract evidence and a larger-work connection. Check whether the order develops your interpretation and gives both works substantial attention.