● IB English Language & Literature A

Core Exam Practice
20 Essential Questions

Paper 1 · Paper 2 · Literary Analysis · All Units Covered

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📘 Exam Guide

Total Questions
20 Multiple Choice
Time Allowed
40 Minutes
Marking
+1 Correct / 0 Wrong
Units Covered
All 5 IB Units
Format
IB Exam Style
Feedback
Instant + Detailed
Concept Review

📖 Unit 1: Readers, Writers & Texts

UNIT 1

This unit explores how meaning is created through the relationship between author, text, and reader. Central to IB English is understanding that texts do not have fixed, singular meanings — they are shaped by context, purpose, audience, and the reader's own perspective.

🔑 Key Terms to Memorise
  • Implied author — the version of the author constructed by the reader from textual cues
  • Unreliable narrator — a narrator whose credibility is compromised; key in modernist fiction
  • Register — the level of formality and tone appropriate to a specific audience or context
  • Diction — deliberate word choice that shapes tone and meaning
  • Intertextuality — references within a text to other texts, genres, or cultural artifacts
📝 Exam Example
"The use of second-person narration in the passage creates an effect of…"
➜ Answer: It implicates the reader directly, collapsing the distance between narrator and audience and increasing immediacy.

🌍 Unit 2: Time & Space

UNIT 2

Literature reflects and is shaped by the historical, cultural, and geographical contexts in which it is produced and received. Understanding time and space allows analysis of how texts both mirror and challenge their societies.

🔑 Key Terms to Memorise
  • Historical context — the period and events surrounding a text's creation
  • Postcolonial reading — examining power, identity, and representation through colonialism's lens
  • Anachronism — something placed in the wrong historical period
  • Chronotope — Bakhtin's term for the intrinsic connection of time and space in narrative
  • Setting as symbol — physical locations that carry thematic or ideological meaning
📝 Exam Example
"How does the Victorian setting of the novel reinforce its central themes?"
➜ Answer: Victorian industrial imagery reinforces themes of class stratification and moral hypocrisy. The fog in Dickens' London symbolises both literal pollution and moral obscurity.

🔗 Unit 3: Intertextuality

UNIT 3

No text exists in isolation. Intertextuality examines how texts reference, adapt, parody, or respond to other texts. IB exams frequently test students' ability to trace these relationships and analyse their effect on meaning.

🔑 Key Terms to Memorise
  • Allusion — indirect reference to another text, person, or event
  • Parody — comic or satirical imitation of a style or text
  • Pastiche — imitation that celebrates rather than mocks the original
  • Genre conventions — expected features of a genre that texts may follow or subvert
  • Palimpsest — a text bearing traces of earlier writing — metaphor for intertextual layering
📝 Exam Example
"Identify the allusion in the line 'To be or not to be — that is the WiFi password' and explain its effect."
➜ Answer: This parodies Hamlet's soliloquy. The juxtaposition of existential crisis with modern triviality creates bathos, satirising society's shallow preoccupations.

🎭 Unit 4: Literary Forms & Techniques

UNIT 4

A mastery of literary devices, narrative techniques, and formal structures is essential for IB Paper 1 unseen analysis. You must be able to name, quote, and explain the effect of techniques on meaning and reader response.

🔑 Key Terms to Memorise
  • Metaphor / Simile / Extended metaphor — figurative comparisons that deepen meaning
  • Enjambment — a line of poetry continuing without pause into the next
  • Volta — the turn or shift in a sonnet, typically at line 9 or 13
  • Free indirect discourse — narrative that blends third-person narration with character's thought
  • Anaphora — repetition of a phrase at the start of successive clauses for emphasis
  • Juxtaposition — placing two contrasting elements side by side to highlight difference
📝 Exam Example
"Analyse the effect of enjambment in Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale'."
➜ Answer: Enjambment in Keats mimics the breathless, uncontrollable quality of longing, drawing the reader forward and enacting the speaker's inability to pause and reflect on mortality.

💬 Unit 5: Language & Mass Communication

UNIT 5

This unit covers non-literary texts — speeches, advertisements, news articles, social media. IB Language & Literature students must analyse purpose, audience, context, and the effect of rhetorical devices in real-world communication.

🔑 Key Terms to Memorise
  • Ethos, Pathos, Logos — Aristotle's modes of persuasion: credibility, emotion, logic
  • Rhetoric — the art of effective or persuasive speaking and writing
  • Bias — a tendency to favour a particular perspective, often covert in media
  • Framing — how information is presented to privilege a particular interpretation
  • Discourse — the broader system of language use in a social or institutional context
  • Satire — the use of humour, irony, or exaggeration to criticise or expose
📝 Exam Example
"How does the speech use pathos to achieve its persuasive purpose?"
➜ Answer: The speaker's use of personal narrative ('I watched my daughter struggle…') appeals to parental fear and empathy, creating emotional identification that bypasses rational critique.
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