Damian Rentoule
The DP English Student Workbook presents a range of student centered activities designed to scaffold the process of literary analysis. All activities presented are directly based on the objectives and assessment criteria from the IB Diploma Programme Language A1 English course.
The DP English Student Workbook:
· systematically introduces the language of literary analysis
· focuses on the student’s role in the building of connections between parts of texts
· presents a mix of substantive conversation and focused writing
· introduces a range of extracts for commentary
· allows original ideas to be generated in a scaffolded framework
The DP English Student Workbook is designed to help students collect and organize their ideas about texts for the full two year period of the DP Language A1 course. The skills targeted in this Workbook will enable students to analyze, in a critical manner, familiar and unfamiliar texts well after they leave our schools and it is in this spirit of Lifelong Learning that the activities have been presented.
Damian Rentoule has worked with the International Baccalaureate programmes in a variety of roles including IB English teacher, Diploma Programme Coordinator, Middle Years Programme Trainer and Upper School Principal in a Middle Years Programme and Diploma Programme IB World School.
Maintaining high levels of accessability for all students to the academically rigorous International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme Language Al course has been a focus of the author for a number of years. He has a passionate interest in the world of ideas that is opened up to students through contact with literature and strongly believes that with appropriate scaffolding and support all students can access this world and learn important lessons about themselves and the worlds in which they live.
The Framework
Many approaches to literary analysis are possible. The following diagram represents the approach that this Student Workbook will use to help you frame your literary responses to texts in a range of written and spoken tasks.
· From the numerous details in the text, literary features can be identified.
· These literary features support specific aspects of the text.
· These aspects of the text in turn support the ideas expressed in a text.
The purpose of this workbook is to examine the ways that we can use language to explain these connections in a clear, concise and precise manner. The six activities presented in this workbook are designed to help you construct and articulate the connections between these parts of the texts that you are studying. Before you look at the details of your texts a general overview is needed to clarify what you already know about the works and their contexts. The introductory activity addresses this.
