The Individual Oral asks a lot of students, even though you have full autonomy throughout the course to prepare for the assessment, choose texts of interest to you, and prepare thoroughly for this ten-minute assessment. A lot less is 'left to chance' and 'having a good day' than in the previous Individual Oral Commentary. However, questions still arise.
What is the Individual Oral supposed to be?
The first and most obvious question that students and teachers around the world are struggling with is: is it a commentary on two texts (indeed, is it comparative?) or is it a framing of an argument about a global issue for which the two texts are merely illustrative material?
To answer this, we should remind ourselves of the instructions from the Subject Guide:
Examine the ways in which the global issue of your choice is presented through the content and form of one of the works and one of the bodies of work you have studied.
How does the text conform to the conventions of its text type?
Where does this assessment come from?
Understanding the origins of the new Individual Oral might help you to become more aware of what is required of you. In the previous iteration of the course, Paper 1 was the only assessment in which the IB was able to ensure that students were engaging with texts and issues that should be of concern to internationalist students and schools. These hot topics - Environmental Sustainability and Climate Change; Equality of Economic Opportunity; Peace not War; Multiculturalism; Celebration of Different Cultures and Localism; Freedom from all Forms of Oppression; Privacy and Security in the Internet Age - became the areas of focus in the texts chosen for the examination papers, and invited students to develop highly nuanced responses to what more could be learned about the topic by looking at the texts together than would be by exploring them separately. Moreover, by engaging with such issues a key area of concern for the IB was that students would begin to understand the difference between internationalism and globalism, and identify how these two movements come into conflict with each other.
The problem with the old HL Paper 1 assessment - and potentially a problem for the new Individual Orals - was that teachers and students never really got to grips with the nature of the assessment, preferring instead to deliver highly detailed 'paint-by-numbers' commentaries on the structure, form and style of the texts on display (and exploration of 'form') without ever really turning enough attention towards the global issue present and comparing and contrasting how the texts present that issue. It is important that the same mistake is not made, then, with the Individual Orals.
How much of Individual Oral - Commentary or Issue? have you understood?
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