Lesson 1: What Counts as a Text?

In IB English A: Language and Literature, the word text means far more than "a book". A text is anything created to communicate meaning to an audience: a novel, a poem, a political speech, a cereal-box slogan, a film poster, a meme, a podcast, a photograph with a caption. The course is built on a liberating idea — that all of these texts are constructed, and that a skilled reader can take any of them apart to see how the construction works. Your job is not to say whether you liked a text. Your job is to explain how its choices of language, structure, image and context produce its effects on an audience. That skill, practised daily, is what every assessment in this course rewards.

The course is organised around three areas of exploration. Readers, writers and texts asks how texts are created and received: why writers make the choices they make, and why readers respond as they do. Time and space asks how texts and their readers are shaped by the cultural and historical worlds they belong to. Intertextuality: connecting texts asks how texts echo, answer and argue with one another. Every lesson in this course belongs mainly to one of these areas, but strong analysis always touches the other two: no text is written in a vacuum, and no reading happens in one either.

What counts as a text?

The IB splits the course material into literary works (novels, plays, poetry collections, and non-fiction prose such as essays and memoirs) and non-literary texts (advertisements, speeches, articles, infographics, cartoons, blogs, photographs, films and more). Non-literary material is studied in bodies of work — groups of texts by the same author, producer or organisation — because a single advert tells you little, while a campaign tells you a great deal about its maker. Both sides matter equally: Paper 1 sets unseen texts from both worlds, and your Individual Oral must pair one of each.

Two questions turn any object into an analysable text. First: what choices were made? Someone selected this word, this image, this order, this silence. Second: what do those choices do? Meaning in this course is never just *what a text says*; it is what the text's construction makes an audience think, feel and do. If you can keep those two questions running in your head, you can analyse anything — a sonnet or a shampoo bottle — with the same disciplined method.

The seven key concepts

The course names seven key concepts that link every text you will study. They are not topics to memorise; they are lenses. Choosing a lens changes what you notice.

Watch how a lens works. Take the opening of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (1863): "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Through the lens of identity, the text constructs a collective self — "our fathers", "a new nation" — binding a fractured wartime audience into one people. Through representation, it frames the Civil War not as a dispute between states but as a test of an idea. The words do not change; the lens changes what the analysis can say about them.

The analysis method: claim, evidence, effect, context

Every strong paragraph in this course follows the same four moves. Claim: a precise point about what the text is doing ("Lincoln presents the war as a test of the nation's founding idea, not as a military campaign"). Evidence: the words that prove it ("conceived in Liberty", "dedicated to the proposition"). Effect: why those words work (the language of birth — "brought forth", "conceived" — makes the nation feel like a living child whose survival is at stake; "proposition" makes equality sound like an experiment still unproven). Context: why it mattered then (spoken in November 1863, at the dedication of a soldiers' cemetery, to an audience that needed the slaughter to mean something).

Notice what the method prevents. It prevents summary ("Lincoln gives a speech about a battle") because the claim must be about construction. It prevents feature-spotting ("there is a metaphor") because every piece of evidence must be carried through to its effect. And it prevents vagueness, because context must explain a choice, not just decorate the paragraph's opening.

A model paragraph, annotated

Why this scores at the top band: the claim is arguable and conceptual (unity is *performed*, not just requested); every quotation is analysed for effect, including the surprise of "proposition"; context (a cemetery dedication in wartime) is woven into the reasoning rather than parked in the introduction; and the paragraph moves from small choices to a large claim about the text's purpose — exactly the direction of travel examiners reward under Criterion B (analysis and evaluation).

Common mistakes

• Treating "literary" as praise and "non-literary" as simple. A perfume advert may deploy more deliberate craft per square centimetre than a weak poem. Examiners penalise the assumption that non-literary texts need no real analysis.
• Analysing content instead of construction. "The speech is about freedom" earns nothing. "The speech builds freedom out of birth imagery and biblical time" earns marks.
• Naming the audience as "everyone". Every text excludes someone. A text's implied audience — the reader it seems designed for — is one of the most revealing things about it.
• Forgetting that you are a reader in a context too. Your reception of a 1950s advert is part of the analysis (Time and space), not an embarrassment to hide.

IB Exam Experience

Paper 1 — guided textual analysis. Here is a practice text: the front of a charity leaflet. "Every night, 800 children in our city go to bed hungry. Aisha is one of them. She is seven. She does her homework by streetlight because the electricity is off again. Three pounds feeds a child like Aisha for a week. Text MEAL to 70450 to give £3 now." At SL you would analyse one text in 1 hour 15 minutes; at HL, two texts in 2 hours 15. Both come with a guiding question, which you must actually answer. Guiding question for this text: *How does the leaflet use individual experience to create a collective responsibility?*

Marking notes against the Paper 1 criteria (each criterion is marked out of 5). Criterion A — understanding and interpretation: top answers grasp that the leaflet converts a statistic into a person so the reader feels personally addressed by a public problem. Criterion B — analysis and evaluation: reward goes to tracing the funnel structure: number (800) narrows to name (Aisha), to one vivid deprivation (homework by streetlight), to one tiny action (£3, one text message) — each step shrinking the reader's excuse for doing nothing. Weak answers list emotive words; strong answers explain the sequence. Criterion C — focus and organisation: the guiding question should structure the essay: claim about responsibility first, technique second. Criterion D — language: precise terminology (direct address, imperative, statistic) used accurately, with quotations embedded, not dropped in.

Going deeper: the whole course on one page

Everything in this course exists to feed four assessments, and seeing the whole machine at the start will help you read every later lesson. The table below is your map for the next two years.

Two features of the machine matter most. First, the assessments interlock: the portfolio feeds the oral and the HL essay; Paper 2's quotation banks are built while studying works for the oral; Paper 1's method is the close-reading engine inside everything else. Study the course as a system and every hour of work is spent twice. Second, the criteria rhyme across components — understanding, analysis, organisation, language — so a weakness (say, claims without effects) taxes you everywhere, and a repair pays you everywhere. Your error log in Lesson 19 is organised by criterion for exactly this reason.

One more foundational idea: bodies of work. On the literary side you study whole works; on the non-literary side, the IB cannot ask you to memorise an advert, so it asks you to know a *maker*: the collected output of a cartoonist, a columnist, an advertising agency, a political campaign, a photojournalist. A body of work has habits — signature subjects, devices, stances toward its audience — and learning to describe those habits is the non-literary equivalent of knowing a novel. When you choose IO extracts, your non-literary half will come from such a body of work, and your analysis will be credited for placing the extract within the maker's larger practice. Start noticing producers now: whose adverts are these? whose speeches? The question "who made this, and what do they always do?" is the seed of half the marks in the course.