Self-Taught Language A: Foundation Knowledge and Skills

The first step towards a detailed stylistic analysis of a text is to consider the specialist terminology of literary criticism that is unique to the literary tradition of the language A you are studying as an SSST student.  

The main purpose of this terminology is to help you to:  

• recognize and label the elements (or author’s choices) that make literature “literary” as opposed to descriptive or informational  

• explain how these elements or choices affect you, the reader, and your understanding of the text, the writer’s style and its larger purpose or global impact.  

Each language and its literature has literary vocabulary that is unique, so you should search for and become familiar with the list of terms appropriate to the study of the literature of your language A. Lists of literary terms could be found on the internet, or they may be something your supervisor can help you access.  

Literary terms are important because they enable ideas to be expressed about patterns you will learn to recognize in your booklist, although not all of them will apply to every work.  

• Sound patterns: how words create “sound effects” that help you create meaning.  
• Rhythmic/metrical patterns: how words might follow or violate an underlying beat or pulse.  
• Image patterns: how words create “pictures” that shift and change, perhaps becoming a symbol.  
• Visual/spatial patterns: how the visual appearance of the words on the page, especially poetry, impacts meaning.  
• Syntactical patterns: how the words follow or violate traditional grammatical rules. 
• Patterns of denotation and connotation: how different meanings of the same word might impact  
• interpretation and possibly create ambiguity. 
• Patterns of punctuation: how punctuation affects the meaning of the words around them.  
• Patterns of sentence structure: how sentence construction, such as short, long or complex, impacts the way a character or narrator’s voice is perceived.  
• Patterns of stanza structure: in poetry, how the structure of a poem into discrete units of text shapes its meaning.  
• Patterns of conflict: how conflicts are introduced, developed, resolved, or left unresolved. 
• Rhetorical patterns: how persuasive devices, such as ethos, pathos and logos, as well as fallacies, impact  
• the relationship between the writer, speaker and the reader.  
• Dramaturgical patterns: how the conventions of drama—the ways in which a play shifts from page to stage—are followed or violated.  

Once you have learned terms and can recognize stylistic patterns, sentences can be created by arranging words in different combinations.  

The table below illustrates how this could be done by choosing words from each column to create a new sentence, for example: “The menacing tone in the text emphasizes the speaker’s reluctance to confront his past”.  

Learner portfolio entries serve as cumulative preparation for the three assessments: Paper 1, paper 2 and the individual oral. However, it is about more than assessment. Your interpretations of each of the nine works on your booklist will build on a tradition of other, preceding interpretations. Recall, from your TOK class, the relationship between personal and shared knowledge. Your learner portfolio entries overlap both of these areas. They also help you to appreciate the impact of a writer’s creative approach on their audience and how this compares to writers in other literary traditions. You will be able to explore these critical, creative and comparative approaches directly in your learner portfolio entries. For each of the nine works, you need to include at least one response using each of these approaches in your learner portfolio:  

Critical  

A critical approach to literary study entails using the skills of analysis such as literary terminology, close reading of writer’s choices, knowledge of literary form conventions and awareness of the writer’s and readers’ contexts to construct an individual interpretation of the work. Your learner portfolio allows you to develop each of these skills—both in isolation and gradually in combination with each other. This might take the form of three paragraphs in which you analyse Mercutio’s soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet translated into your language A language. You could explore how the macabre imagery in Mercutio’s speech is the culmination of the preceding chaos of the battle between the Capulets and Montagues and also foreshadows his own death. How does the content and structure of Mercutio’s soliloquy make this character stand out among the others in the play?  

Creative  

You will also use the learner portfolio to explore the works using a creative approach by using and developing your imagination. When reading a work, you are not only a reader but also a writer. By putting yourself in the position of a writer, you can start exploring different tools that a writer needs to use, such as techniques, language, form or tone, to create a piece of work. This helps develop your skills as a critical reader. You can live in the imaginative world of the characters, situations and contexts and then weave those together to create something beautiful and build your own world.  

Imagine yourself being Juliet, from Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare, then re-create a page from Juliet’s diary. What would Juliet write after meeting Romeo for the first time? You can write a few diary entries to express Juliet’s thoughts and feelings. Another idea might be to write the biography for Romeo and Juliet that may include how old they were, their home town, how and where they met, what happened between them, their deaths or the results of their deaths. Imagine what life was like for a 14-year-old daughter living in a wealthy family in Verona during the Renaissance. How would this knowledge help you to enhance your understanding of the play as a whole? By being creative, you will gain knowledge, understand different literary forms and know how to use techniques and language better to approach your assessment components later.  

Comparative  

A comparative approach to the reading of a work involves establishing connections between works and becoming aware of their similarities and differences. A good starting point when you approach a work this way is to try to ask yourself how it relates to other works you have read before. No work is written in a vacuum; every writer is aware of a tradition that precedes them and of the fact that a new work will establish some kind of relation to it. This tradition expresses itself not only in universal themes that literature addresses repeatedly, but also in the way and form in which they address them. A text may relate to another because of a similar subject matter they explore, but it also relates to all other texts that were written in the same literary form. It could be asked how far a text has adhered to or departed from their corresponding conventions.  

Your task as a reader is to try to discover the nature of the relationship between this text and the literature that was written before and after it. This relationship could be one of continuity, of tension, or of questioning. The relationship could be implicit or explicit. For example, if you were reading Romeo and Juliet, you could explore how the play relates to previous or later literary explorations of other “star-crossed lovers”. You could ask how this play interacts with other tragedies by Shakespeare or by other writers. You could compare and contrast film versions by director Franco Zeffirelli, from 1968, and director Baz Luhrmann, from 1996. You could examine how the song composed by the band Radiohead for Luhrmann’s film, “Exit music (for a film)” interacts with Shakespeare’s play. The tasks chronicled in your learner portfolio could range from a Venn diagram establishing similarities and differences between the play and the two films to the creation of a song that could have been included in the film adaptation of the play.  

Central to the DP language A courses are the seven concepts of culture, creativity, communication, perspective, transformation, representation and identity. These concepts are “broad, powerful organizing ideas that have relevance both within and across subject areas” (Approaches to teaching and learning in the Diploma Programme guide). They are at the heart of the course and will enable the study of works on your booklist to be organized by guiding you think about them in greater depth and making it easier to establish connections between them.  

As you read each of the works on your booklist, you will realize that they are connected to most, if not all, of these concepts. When you reflect on each work, explore the way these concepts are present in it and to what extent some have a greater relevance than others. This will help you to reflect upon the nature of the statement the work might be making.  

The following table contains some discussion points for each of the seven concepts, and some ideas which may be explored in the reading log entries which will form part of your portfolio. You should take these ideas as a springboard to get you thinking about the seven concepts in creative and personal ways.  

During the two-year course, you will investigate how a range of texts connect clearly to a variety of global issues. You will then explore the ways in which these issues are present in your booklist and how different authors and texts represent, reflect and/or explore them through their choice of literary form, structure, language use or literary devices. The global issues you select will shape your focus for the individual oral.  

Properties of a global issue  

A global issue incorporates the following three properties:  

• it has significance on a wide or large scale  

• it is transnational  

• its impact is felt in everyday, local contexts.  

The following list contains some suggested fields of inquiry.