IB Diploma Programme English Literature Standard Level
IB Diploma Programme Language A: Literature (English) Standard Level is a two-year pre-university literary course organized around three areas of exploration—Readers, Writers and Texts; Time and Space; and Intertextual Perspectives—and seven central concepts (identity, culture, creativity, communication, transformation, representation, perspective). Students study a minimum of four literary works across at least three literary forms (poetry, prose fiction, prose non-fiction, drama) and at least three geographic and temporal contexts, developing skills of close reading, literary analysis, comparative essay writing, and oral presentation through externally assessed papers and an internally assessed individual oral.
$123
Exam Cost
Who Should Take This
Pre-university students (ages 16–19) enrolled in an IB Diploma Programme school who seek rigorous literary study in English as their mother tongue or primary language of instruction, whether pursuing an arts pathway or seeking to strengthen analytical writing and communication skills for any undergraduate discipline.
What's Covered
1Area of Exploration 1: Readers, Writers and Texts
2Area of Exploration 2: Time and Space
3Area of Exploration 3: Intertextual Perspectives
4Paper 1: Guided Literary Analysis of Unseen Text
5Paper 2: Comparative Essay on Studied Works
6Individual Oral: Global Issue and Literary Works
7Seven Central Concepts
8Literary Forms and Genre Study
What's Included in AccelaStudy® AI
Adaptive Knowledge Graph
Practice Questions
Lesson Modules
Console Simulator Labs
Exam Tips & Strategy
13 Activity Formats
Course Outline
1Area of Exploration 1: Readers, Writers and Texts 3 topics
How Texts Create Meaning
- Recall the three areas of exploration (Readers/Writers/Texts; Time and Space; Intertextual Perspectives) and state what literary questions each area frames for the course
- Explain how authorial choices in diction, syntax, and structure work together to construct a text's central meaning and produce specific tonal and emotional effects on a reader
- Analyse how narrative voice—including first-person, third-person limited, and omniscient perspectives—shapes reader alignment and controls the release of information within a prose text
- Analyse how ambiguity and irony—verbal, situational, and dramatic—create interpretive plurality and complicate a text's surface meaning, requiring a reader to hold multiple simultaneous readings
The Role of the Reader
- Explain the concept of reader positioning and describe how implied readers, target audiences, and actual readers may interpret the same passage differently based on their cultural and experiential contexts
- Analyse how a writer uses second-person address, free indirect discourse, or narrative gaps to implicate the reader as an active co-creator of the text's meaning rather than a passive recipient of a fixed message
The Role of the Writer and Authorial Choices
- Recall the key biographical, social, and historical factors that shaped the production of at least two of the course's studied literary works, linking authorial context to textual features
- Explain how an author's stated or implied purpose shapes structural decisions such as genre selection, narrative point of view, and tonal register in a studied literary work
- Analyse how implicit ideological assumptions embedded in a writer's language choices—such as gendered pronouns, colonial diction, or class markers—position the reader and encode the text's ideological stance
2Area of Exploration 2: Time and Space 2 topics
Historical and Cultural Context of Texts
- Recall the historical periods and geographic origins of each studied literary work, placing them correctly on a timeline and cultural map spanning at least three time periods and three places
- Explain how specific historical events, social movements, or political ideologies of a work's production era are reflected in its themes, character roles, or narrative conflicts
- Analyse how a literary work both reflects and refracts its cultural moment—identifying where the text affirms, subverts, or critiques the dominant ideologies of its time and place of production
Place, Setting, and Temporal Structure as Literary Meaning
- Explain how physical setting—including landscape, architecture, and spatial arrangement—functions symbolically to reinforce character psychology or thematic concerns in a studied prose or drama text
- Analyse how temporal structure—including flashback (analepsis), flash-forward (prolepsis), in medias res openings, and cyclical endings—controls a reader's emotional and interpretive experience of a prose narrative
3Area of Exploration 3: Intertextual Perspectives 2 topics
Connections and Relationships Between Texts
- Recall the definition of intertextuality and identify at least three forms it can take—allusion, parody, pastiche, adaptation—giving a course-text example of each form
- Explain how a studied work alludes to, responds to, or reimagines another literary text, examining what the intertextual relationship adds to the meaning of each work for an informed reader
- Synthesise thematic parallels across two or more studied works—including one in translation—identifying convergences and divergences in how different literary traditions address a shared human concern
Literary Traditions and Intertextual Influence
- Explain key conventions of at least two literary traditions—such as the Romantic lyric, the realist novel, or Greek tragedy—and describe how knowledge of these conventions shapes readers' expectations and interpretations
- Analyse how a studied work deliberately subverts or deconstructs genre conventions to create thematic or tonal effects that a convention-conforming work in the same tradition would not achieve
4Paper 1: Guided Literary Analysis of Unseen Text 2 topics
Paper 1 Assessment Criteria
- Recall the four Paper 1 assessment criteria—understanding and interpretation, analysis of stylistic features, organisation and focus, language and terminology—and state the mark allocation for each at SL out of 20
- Explain the distinction between Criterion A (what the text says and implies) and Criterion B (how the writer achieves effects through stylistic choices) using annotated textual evidence from a practice passage
- Apply all four Paper 1 criteria simultaneously to evaluate a sample student response, identifying which criterion is weakest and explaining how specific revisions would raise the overall score
Paper 1 Analytical Approach and Process
- Apply a structured pre-writing annotation process to an unseen literary passage—identifying genre markers, tone shifts, structural pivot points, and dominant literary devices within the first ten minutes of reading
- Synthesise a coherent 600–900-word guided literary analysis of an unseen text that builds a clear interpretive argument across multiple analytical paragraphs, each grounding claims in specific cited textual evidence
5Paper 2: Comparative Essay on Studied Works 2 topics
Paper 2 Assessment Criteria
- Recall the four Paper 2 assessment criteria—knowledge and understanding, analysis and evaluation, coherence and focus, language—and state their respective mark weightings out of 30 for SL
- Explain how Criterion B (analysis and evaluation) rewards interpretive insight and evidence of critical thinking over plot summary, using a scored sample essay to illustrate the difference between a band-3 and band-5 response
Paper 2 Essay Structure and Comparative Technique
- Apply an integrated comparative essay structure—weaving between both studied texts paragraph by paragraph around shared thematic or technical focal points—rather than a block structure that addresses each work in isolation
- Synthesise a 700–1,000-word comparative essay responding to a Paper 2 style question, sustaining a coherent argument about how two studied works diverge or converge in their treatment of a shared literary theme or technique
6Individual Oral: Global Issue and Literary Works 2 topics
Global Issue Selection and Development
- Recall the IB's five Fields of Inquiry and explain how each frames potential global issues for the Individual Oral, giving one concrete literary example of a global issue derived from each field
- Explain how to narrow a broad thematic topic into a specific, arguable global issue statement that can be sustained across a ten-minute oral presentation and evidenced by extracts from two literary works
- Apply the global issue framework to select two contrasting textual extracts—one from a work in translation—and plan how each extract illuminates a different facet of the chosen global issue through both content and form
Individual Oral Structure and Delivery
- Recall the Individual Oral format—10-minute presentation plus 5-minute teacher-led discussion—and state the four assessment criteria and their mark weightings out of 40 total
- Explain how to divide a ten-minute Individual Oral into a proportional structure covering introduction of the global issue, close analysis of Extract 1, close analysis of Extract 2, comparative synthesis, and conclusion
- Apply close-reading skills within an oral delivery context—citing passages by memory or annotated notes—to analyse how literary form such as dramatic irony in drama or enjambment in poetry shapes the presentation of the global issue in each extract
7Seven Central Concepts 3 topics
Identity and Representation
- Explain how the concept of identity operates in a studied literary work—examining how the text constructs, challenges, or complicates the identities of characters, narrators, or communities through language and narrative choices
- Analyse how representation—the selective re-presentation of social reality through literary language—encodes power relationships and shapes a reader's understanding of marginalised or dominant groups in a studied work
Culture and Transformation
- Explain how the concept of culture in a studied literary work reflects shared belief systems and social practices, and how these frameworks both enable and constrain the choices available to characters
- Analyse how the concept of transformation—applied to character arc, social order, or literary form itself—functions as both a structural and thematic device, distinguishing productive from failed or tragic transformation in a studied work
Communication, Creativity, and Perspective
- Explain how the concept of creativity operates in a writer's compositional decisions and in a reader's active construction of meaning, noting where creative interpretation diverges from demonstrable authorial intent
- Analyse how perspective as a structural device—including narrative focalization, dramatic monologue, and epistolary form—controls what a reader can and cannot know, shaping the moral and emotional weight of a narrative or poem
8Literary Forms and Genre Study 3 topics
Poetry
- Recall the formal features of lyric, narrative, and dramatic poetry—including metre, rhyme scheme, stanza form, enjambment, and caesura—and identify these features by name in sample poems
- Explain how sound devices—including alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, and rhythm—create tonal and emotional effects that reinforce or counterpoint a poem's overt thematic content
- Analyse how a poem's line breaks, white space, and stanzaic structure enact meaning—identifying specific moments where the poem's form mirrors, disrupts, or ironises its overt content in a studied or unseen poem
- Analyse how figurative language—including extended metaphor, simile, personification, and synecdoche—constructs and develops a poem's central argument or emotional trajectory across multiple stanzas
Prose Fiction and Non-Fiction
- Recall the key formal features distinguishing prose fiction from prose non-fiction, and identify within a passage the genre markers of narrator reliability, fictive invention versus documentary claim, and scene versus summary
- Explain how a prose writer uses paragraph rhythm, sentence length variation, and syntactic patterns such as anaphora, tricolon, or fragmentation to control pace, emphasis, and reader experience
- Analyse how a prose narrator's reliability is constructed and undermined through textual cues—including internal contradiction, limited access to information, and tonal incongruence—and what interpretive consequences follow for the reader
- Apply close prose analysis skills to a non-fiction extract—memoir, personal essay, or travel writing—identifying how the writer's subjective voice, selection of detail, and rhetorical strategies produce literary effects comparable to those in prose fiction
Drama
- Recall the key conventions of dramatic form—including stage directions, soliloquy, aside, dramatic irony, chorus, and acts-and-scenes structure—and explain how each shapes meaning differently from prose narration
- Explain how subtext in dramatic dialogue—what characters imply but do not state—functions as a literary device, examining how silence, interruption, or deflection reveals character psychology and relational power in a studied play
- Analyse how staging elements encoded in stage directions—including blocking, props, symbolic setting, and lighting—function as extensions of the dramatic text's meaning rather than merely logistical performance instructions
- Analyse how dramatic structure—exposition, rising action, climax, reversal (peripeteia), recognition (anagnorisis), and denouement—is manipulated in a studied play to create or subvert audience expectation
Scope
Included Topics
- Close reading and guided literary analysis of unseen literary texts
- Comparative essay writing across two literary works (Paper 2)
- Individual oral presentation on a global issue across two works
- Study of at least four literary works across poetry, prose fiction, prose non-fiction, and drama
- Works in translation and cross-cultural literary comparison
- Seven IB central concepts: identity, culture, creativity, communication, transformation, representation, perspective
- Three areas of exploration: Readers/Writers/Texts; Time and Space; Intertextual Perspectives
- Literary devices, stylistic and structural features, and their effects on meaning
- Learner portfolio reflection and textual engagement activities
- IB assessment criteria application: understanding, analysis, organisation, language use
Not Covered
- Language A: Language and Literature non-literary media text analysis as a primary genre
- Higher Level-only components such as the HL Essay (1,200–1,500 words)
- Second language acquisition or Language B skills
- Extended Essay literary research at dissertation depth
- Creative writing production as an assessed component
- Non-IB English Literature syllabi such as A-level or AP Literature
Official Exam Page
Learn more at International Baccalaureate