Home › Forums › Inquiry and resource design › Year 13 Language and Literature coursework
We’ve been quite involved with languages in the Upper School this term (including English A level and IBDP, German IBDP and Spanish A level). This topic particularly focuses on the IB DP Higher Level essay for Language and Literature students, but the resources are likely to be applicable, possibly with some adaptations across other syllabuses too.
A useful feature from my perspective of the IB DP courses for native speakers (known as Group 1 languages in IB vocabulary) is that there are only two generic specifications that cover all languages – you either choose Literature or Language and Literature. Once this choice is made, the requirements are exactly the same regardless of the target language. In this particular case I was working with a German teacher, but the resources I produced would apply to any IB DP Language and Literature course (possibly with some translation – we were under a bit of time pressure and I don’t speak much German so all the resources are in English!).
My first job when the teacher approached me for help supporting her students with their topic and question choices, and then with investigating their questions and planning their essays, was to scour the specification and the MyIB portal for all the information I could find on the essay. I generally find that, while the teachers are the subject experts and it is incredibly important to pick their brains first, when designing resources for coursework it is essential to plan directly from the specification. Otherwise it becomes a game of Chinese whispers and it would be easy to end up with something based on what I think the teacher said based on what they think the specification says…
The next post will discuss the resources I produced.
These are the resources (which are available from the Resources section of the website). Any comments or suggestions for improvement would, as always, be very welcome:
I haven’t created a specific Reflect resource for this coursework – although reflection is something that is encouraged and supported by our teachers more broadly, so it may be that one is not needed here. My longer term goal, however, is to create a meaningful Reflect resource that can be used in the Upper School.
Thanks for these Jenny, and I can see how many of them might also be of use for the MFL A-level Individual Research Projects which I know you have also looked into for Spanish. It would be good to see how we can combine the ideas you have developed here with the resources I have used with French and Italian (A2 Italian Resources available for download here) in the past to try to improve our support for those students too. This could be especially important in the current climate where the IRP might count for an awful lot were exams to be cancelled again.
It would be great if we could get the MFL teachers we have worked with to post their thoughts about the processes and working with the resources here too.