IB Diploma Programme English Language and Literature Higher Level
The IB Diploma Programme English Language and Literature Higher Level (Lang & Lit HL) course develops advanced skills in critical reading, textual analysis, and expository writing across literary and non-literary texts in English. Students explore how meaning is constructed through language, context, and authorial choices within three official Areas of Exploration — Readers, Writers and Texts; Time and Space; and Intertextuality — while engaging with seven key concepts (identity, culture, creativity, communication, perspective, transformation, representation). Assessment comprises four components: Paper 1 (guided textual analysis of unseen passages, 35%), Paper 2 (comparative literary essay, 25%), the HL Essay (independent literary or language inquiry, 20%), and the Individual Oral (global-issue oral presentation, 20%).
4/7
Passing Score
Who Should Take This
IB Diploma candidates registered for English A: Language and Literature at Higher Level who need to master all four assessment components and the full conceptual framework for their May or November examination session.
What's Covered
1Readers, Writers and Texts
2Time and Space
3Intertextuality
4Seven Key Concepts
5Non-Literary Text Types and Media
6Assessment Components and Academic Skills
7Academic Writing and Language Craft
8Global Issues and Key Concept Application
What's Included in AccelaStudy® AI
Adaptive Knowledge Graph
Practice Questions
Lesson Modules
Console Simulator Labs
Exam Tips & Strategy
13 Activity Formats
Course Outline
1Readers, Writers and Texts 3 topics
How Language Constructs Meaning
- Analyse how a writer's diction and connotation establish tone and ideological positioning in both literary and non-literary texts, distinguishing denotative and evaluative layers of word choice
- Analyse how syntactic patterning — sentence length, parallelism, periodic versus cumulative structures — generates rhetorical rhythm and emotional pacing in prose and poetry
- Apply knowledge of figurative devices — metaphor, simile, personification, synecdoche, irony — to explain how non-literal language encodes layered meaning and shapes reader response
- Analyse how narrative voice — first-person unreliable, free indirect discourse, omniscient, second-person — positions the reader and constructs intimacy, distance, or dramatic irony
Literary Forms and Generic Conventions
- Analyse how prosodic features — metre, rhyme scheme, enjambment, caesura, stanzaic form — interact with imagery and tone to produce meaning in a poem
- Analyse how narrative structure — linear chronology, analepsis, in medias res, frame narrative — controls dramatic tension and thematic development in prose fiction
- Analyse how dramatic conventions — stage directions, dialogue, soliloquy, dramatic irony, spectacle — function as authorial language choices that shape meaning beyond the spoken word
- Evaluate how texts subvert or hybridize established generic conventions to produce ideological or aesthetic effect, using specific formal features as evidence
Audience, Purpose, and Reader Positioning
- Comprehend how texts construct implied audiences through register, mode of address, lexical choice, and embedded assumptions about reader knowledge and values
- Apply a purpose taxonomy — to inform, persuade, entertain, satirize, commemorate — to distinguish authorial intent from textual effect and explain gaps between the two
- Analyse how classical rhetorical strategies — ethos, pathos, logos, antithesis, anaphora, tricolon — function in non-literary persuasive texts such as political speeches and editorials
2Time and Space 2 topics
Historical, Social, and Cultural Contexts of Production
- Comprehend defining characteristics of major literary periods — Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism — and identify period-specific formal and thematic signatures in prescribed texts
- Apply knowledge of an author's historical moment — political movements, social upheaval, literary period — to explain how external conditions shape textual choices and thematic preoccupations
- Analyse how texts reflect, reinforce, or challenge ideological frameworks — patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism — through representation, language, and structure
Contexts of Reception and Shifting Meanings
- Analyse how a text's meaning and cultural value have shifted across different readerships and historical reception contexts, demonstrating that interpretation is not fixed
- Apply named critical lenses — feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, psychoanalytic, ecocritical — to re-read a text and articulate what each lens reveals and conceals
- Analyse how represented place — landscape, urban space, domestic interior — functions as symbolic extension of character psychology or thematic argument in a literary text
3Intertextuality 2 topics
Intertextual Connections and Allusion
- Comprehend how allusions — mythological, biblical, literary, historical — enrich textual meaning by importing external narrative or symbolic weight into a new context
- Analyse how an adaptation or rewriting transforms source material — through selection, amplification, or reversal — to produce new ideological or aesthetic argument
- Synthesize a comparative argument across two texts that traces a shared theme or formal strategy while accounting for differences in genre, period, or cultural position
Literary and Non-Literary Text Dialogue
- Analyse how the same global issue is represented differently when mediated through a literary work versus a non-literary body of work, accounting for mode, form, and audience
- Apply the concept of a unified body of work to a non-literary producer — an advertising campaign, a news outlet's editorial output, a politician's speeches — identifying cohesive stylistic and ideological patterns
4Seven Key Concepts 2 topics
Identity and Culture in Texts
- Analyse how texts construct, perform, or destabilize identity along axes of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality through characterization, focalization, and language choice
- Analyse how cultural context shapes the production and reception of texts, examining how shared belief systems, traditions, and taboos generate interpretive conventions
- Evaluate how literary and non-literary texts represent marginalized or othered groups, assessing whether such representations reinforce or subvert dominant cultural narratives
Creativity, Perspective, and Transformation
- Evaluate the creative dimensions of an author's formal choices — structure, typography, mixed register, experimental syntax — explaining how unconventional technique serves argumentative or aesthetic purpose
- Analyse how a text orchestrates multiple or competing perspectives — through polyphony, dual narration, or ironic distance — to resist single authoritative interpretation
- Apply the concept of transformation to explain how texts alter inherited forms, genres, or narratives — and what political or cultural work that transformation performs
5Non-Literary Text Types and Media 2 topics
Text Type Conventions and Formal Features
- Comprehend the formal conventions of advertising texts — tagline, visual hierarchy, brand voice, call to action, emotional appeal — and explain how each element targets a defined consumer demographic
- Analyse the conventions of journalistic genres — news report, opinion column, feature article, editorial — distinguishing how voice, evidence marshalling, and structural choices differ by subgenre
- Analyse how formal speeches — political address, TED talk, eulogy — deploy oral conventions including direct address, repetition, strategic pause, and inclusive pronouns to mobilize audience solidarity
- Apply analytical frameworks to digital and social media texts — blog posts, social media posts, podcasts — identifying how platform affordances and networked audiences shape stylistic and discursive choices
Language, Power, and Representation in Media
- Analyse how language choices in non-literary texts enact or contest power relations — through framing, labeling, euphemism, and discourse patterns that normalize particular social arrangements
- Analyse how visual and multimodal elements — layout, typography, image, colour — work in concert with written language to construct meaning in advertisements, magazine spreads, and digital texts
6Assessment Components and Academic Skills 4 topics
Paper 1: Guided Textual Analysis
- Apply a systematic pre-writing protocol to an unseen text — identifying text type, context, purpose, audience, and initial formal observations within the first five minutes of a timed examination
- Apply the guiding questions printed on Paper 1 to structure a focused commentary that addresses specified aspects without losing independent analytical voice
- Synthesize close-reading observations into a coherent analytical argument that explains how stylistic choices produce a cumulative interpretive effect rather than listing features in isolation
- Evaluate a draft Paper 1 analysis against all four official criteria — understanding and interpretation (A), analysis and evaluation (B), focus and organization (C), language (D) — and identify the specific band descriptors limiting the score
- Strategize time allocation across two separate Paper 1 analyses (HL requirement), prioritizing depth on each passage while maintaining consistent criterion coverage across both essays within 135 minutes
Paper 2: Comparative Literary Essay
- Synthesize a thematic comparative framework linking two studied literary works under a shared conceptual lens that generates genuine insight rather than parallel summary
- Strategize Paper 2 question selection by rapidly mapping each of the four provided prompts against prepared thematic arguments and discarding prompts that require substantial new analysis under timed conditions
- Apply integrated comparative discourse — embedding parallel textual evidence from both works within single thematic paragraphs — rather than treating each work in separate halves of the essay
HL Essay
- Synthesize a focused line of literary or linguistic inquiry into a well-formed research question that is specific enough for 1200-1500 words of sustained analysis but broad enough to sustain a genuine argument
- Strategize the supervised sessions for the HL Essay by using teacher feedback to sharpen the thesis and adjust evidence selection without allowing feedback to become co-authorship
- Apply the IB rule that HL Essay, Paper 2, and Individual Oral must each address different works, managing the portfolio of six HL texts to avoid repeated use of the same work across all four assessment tasks
Individual Oral
- Strategize the selection of a global issue that is simultaneously transnational in scope, personally defensible, and productively present in both a literary work and a non-literary body of work studied in class
- Apply criteria for extract selection — representativeness of the global issue, rich formal texture, length within 40-line limit — to identify optimal passage pairs from the literary and non-literary texts
- Synthesize a 10-minute oral presentation structure that opens with a clear global issue statement, develops balanced analysis of both texts, and uses signposting to maintain criterion C focus and organization
- Apply formal oral register — accurate literary terminology, varied sentence complexity, controlled pacing, absence of filler language — while maintaining natural fluency under examination conditions
- Strategize responses to teacher follow-up questions in the 5-minute discussion phase by extending or qualifying the oral argument rather than repeating it, demonstrating flexibility in applying literary concepts
7Academic Writing and Language Craft 2 topics
Essay Structure and Argumentation
- Synthesize a thesis statement that takes a specific, defensible, arguable position about how authorial choices produce a particular effect — avoiding descriptive or factual claims that need no proof
- Apply the principle of argumentative topic sentences to each body paragraph — ensuring each sentence advances the thesis and forecasts the analytical move of the paragraph rather than introducing content neutrally
- Apply embed-quote-comment discipline to integrate textual evidence: weave short quotations grammatically into the analytical sentence, then immediately explain the specific effect of the quoted language
- Synthesize a counter-reading within a nuanced essay by acknowledging an alternative interpretation and explaining why the primary argument better accounts for the textual evidence
Language Accuracy and Academic Register
- Apply precise literary and linguistic terminology — free indirect discourse, hypotaxis, anaphora, focalizer, parataxis, polysemy — accurately and contextually in written analysis, avoiding misapplied or vague usage
- Apply formal academic register consistently throughout written work — third person, present tense for textual discussion, avoidance of colloquialism and contraction — as required by IB criterion D descriptors
- Apply strategies for syntactic variety — interleaving complex-compound sentences with short declarative punches — to create analytical prose that is both rigorous and readable under IB criterion D descriptors
8Global Issues and Key Concept Application 2 topics
Global Issue Identification and Framing
- Comprehend the IB criteria for a valid global issue — wide scale significance, transnational reach, local everyday impact — and distinguish compliant from non-compliant issue framings with examples
- Apply analytical frameworks to texts addressing environmental global issues — climate change, ecological devastation, species loss — examining how authorial choices position the reader's environmental consciousness
- Apply analytical frameworks to texts addressing political and social global issues — migration, inequality, surveillance, war — tracing how form and content collaborate to take a position on systemic power
- Apply analytical frameworks to texts addressing health, science, and technology global issues — pandemics, bioethics, algorithmic bias — analysing how language mediates public understanding and fear
Applying the Seven Key Concepts in Analysis
- Strategize the deployment of a key concept — identity, culture, creativity, communication, perspective, transformation, or representation — as a generative analytical lens that drives a textual argument rather than serving as a thematic label
- Analyse the concept of communication in multimodal non-literary texts by examining how visual, verbal, spatial, and gestural modes interact to produce a unified message that no single mode could convey alone
Scope
Included Topics
- Paper 1 guided textual analysis of unseen literary and non-literary passages
- Paper 2 comparative essay on two studied literary works
- HL Essay (1200-1500 words) on a literary or non-literary work
- Individual Oral (10-minute presentation + 5-minute discussion) linking a global issue to a literary and non-literary text
- Seven key concepts: identity, culture, creativity, communication, perspective, transformation, representation
- Three Areas of Exploration: Readers Writers and Texts; Time and Space; Intertextuality
- Non-literary text types and media conventions (advertisements, speeches, journalism, social media, film)
- Literary forms and devices across poetry, prose fiction, and drama
- Assessment criteria A-D: knowledge and interpretation, analysis and evaluation, focus and organization, language
- Global issues framework and transnational significance criteria
Not Covered
- IB English A: Literature (separate course with no non-literary component)
- IB English B language acquisition courses
- Standard Level-only tasks (SL students write one Paper 1 analysis, not two)
- Works in translation studied under Language A: Literature only
- Extended Essay in English (separate independent research component)
- Theory of Knowledge assessed writing
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