IB English Lang Lit SL flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Implied reader

The audience position a text constructs through address, register and assumed knowledge. It may differ from actual readers and is inferred from textual evidence rather than from the writer's stated intentions.

Focalisation

The perspective through which narrative information is filtered. Internal focalisation restricts knowledge to one character's perception; external focalisation reports only observable behaviour, withholding interiority from the reader.

Register: field, tenor, mode

Field is the subject matter, tenor the relationship between writer and reader, and mode the channel (spoken, written, digital). Together they give a systematic vocabulary for describing a text's style.

Ethos, pathos, logos

Three classical appeals used to classify persuasion: ethos builds the speaker's credibility, pathos works on the audience's emotions, and logos relies on reasoning and evidence. Useful for analysing non-literary argument.

Unreliable narration

A narrator whose account the reader has reason to distrust, signalled by contradiction, omission, self-interest or gaps between stated and revealed values. The gap between narration and implied author creates interpretive meaning.

Analepsis and prolepsis

Narrative anachronies: analepsis is a flashback to earlier story events, prolepsis a flash-forward to later ones. Both disrupt chronological order and are analysed in terms of order, not merely content.

Narrative duration

The relationship between story time and discourse time. Scene approximates real time, summary compresses it, stretch slows it, ellipsis omits it and pause halts story time for description or comment.

Chronotope

Bakhtin's term for the fusion of temporal and spatial markers in narrative, such as the road or the threshold. These configurations shape what kinds of action, encounter and character are possible.

Setting as metonym

A use of place where physical environment stands in for or expresses a character's psychology, social position or moral condition, rather than functioning as neutral backdrop or mere local colour.

Iterative frequency

A narrative mode in which one statement covers an event that recurred many times ('each morning she walked to the shore'), compressing habitual experience rather than reporting a single occasion.

Temporal deixis

Words such as now, then, tomorrow and yesterday that anchor a text in time relative to the speaker. Shifts in deictic centre often mark changes of voice, frame or setting.

Spatial boundaries

Structural divisions in a text's geography - inside/outside, centre/periphery, public/private - which typically encode power relations and regulate which characters may move where, and with what consequences.

Intertextuality

The shaping of a text's meaning by other texts, through allusion, quotation, parody, genre convention or shared myth. Meaning emerges from the relationship rather than from either text alone.

Parody versus pastiche

Both imitate another style, but parody adds critical or comic distance and implicitly judges the source, whereas pastiche imitates without that evaluative edge. The distinction sharpens comparative claims.

Appropriation

The deliberate relocation of a source text into a new time, place or culture. Analysis asks what is retained, what is altered, and what argument the alteration makes about the original.

Genre as intertextual system

Genre conventions create reader expectations that a text can satisfy, defer or frustrate. Treating genre this way explains how form itself carries meaning across texts and periods.

Comparative verbs

Precise verbs for intertextual and comparative claims: echoes, revises, subverts, reinforces, reframes, contests, extends. Each makes a different, testable assertion about the relationship between texts.

Allusion

An indirect or passing reference to another text, figure or event that relies on the reader's recognition. Its effect depends on the assumed knowledge of the implied reader.

Guided textual analysis

The Paper 1 task: an unseen literary or non-literary text accompanied by a guiding question. The response must analyse construction and effect while explicitly answering that question throughout.

Anchorage and relay

Barthes' terms for image-text relations: anchorage uses words to fix an image's meaning, while relay sets words and image in complementary, mutually extending relationship. Central for analysing advertisements.

Feature-spotting

Naming a technique without explaining its effect on meaning, tone or reader. It is the most common weakness in Paper 1 responses, because it substitutes identification for analysis.

Paper 1 time split

For the 1 hour 15 minute SL paper: roughly 10 minutes reading and annotating, 55 to 60 minutes writing, and 5 minutes checking that the guiding question is answered explicitly.

Text-type conventions

Recurring formal features of a genre or medium - headlines and bylines in articles, slogans in advertisements, salutations in letters, direct address in speeches - which orient the reader before content is analysed.

Paper 2 comparative thesis

A single sentence stating an arguable claim about both works, not merely announcing the topic. It should name the shared concern and the significant difference in how each text treats it.

Comparative paragraph engine

A repeatable structure: point, evidence and analysis for work A, explicit comparative link, evidence and analysis for work B, then an evaluative sentence on the difference the comparison reveals.

Balance requirement

Both works must receive substantively equal treatment in the Paper 2 essay. A paragraph discussing only one text must be followed immediately by its counterpart on the other work.

Context in Paper 2

Contextual material is used selectively to explain differences of genre, period or audience between works. It never replaces textual evidence and is not rewarded as biographical summary.

Global issue criteria

For the individual oral, the issue must be transnational, significant to a wide audience, and demonstrable in both chosen extracts. Narrow phrasing such as 'the normalisation of gendered labour' works better than broad labels.

Individual oral structure

Ten minutes of presentation covering both extracts and their comparative links, followed by five minutes of teacher questioning. Internally assessed and externally moderated by the IB.

Extract requirements

One literary and one non-literary work, each extract no longer than 40 lines, with the same global issue demonstrable in both. The literary work must originally be in the language of study.

Assessment weightings SL

At Standard Level, Paper 1 accounts for 35 percent, Paper 2 for 35 percent and the individual oral for 30 percent. The Higher Level essay does not apply to SL candidates.

Areas of exploration

The three organising lenses of the course: readers, writers and texts; time and space; and intertextuality. They frame how works are selected, taught and connected across the syllabus.