Doing well at Literature in the IB Diploma Program is no mean feat. As the IBDP officially states, the aim is for students to understand the processes involved in the production and reception of literature: specifically, “the creativity of writers and readers, the nature of their interaction with their respective contexts and with literary tradition, the ways in which language can give rise to the meaning and/or effect, and the performative and transformative potential of literary creation and response.”
Students will be expected to be able to do close literary analysis – a skill that must be developed and practiced – of a range of literary texts in a number of literary forms and from different times and places.
To do well, your child must create personal interpretations of texts while considering the critical perspectives of others, exploring how these interpretations are shaped by cultural belief systems. To graduate well, your child should have honed his or her skills in interpretation, analysis, and evaluation. He or she must have developed a sensitivity to the aesthetic qualities of texts and an appreciation of how they contribute to diverse responses and open up multiple meanings.
More than that, your child will need to understand intertextuality and its implications – in other words, your child should understand the relationships between texts, cultural contexts, and local and global issues.
Studies in literature will allow students to become better listeners, speakers, readers, writers and communicators.