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Hi.

I am doing IB in Poland with Polish A1 HL and have exams in May 2015 (so I'm still in the first grade). Recently our teacher told us to write an "interpretation commentary" based on one text. I don't really know how it would be called in English. I've read the subject outline but it didn't help. I found only information about an essay, literary commentary (this must be it but I'm still not sure), guided literary analysis and written assigment. And this is already for exams, not a homework. Does anybody know what "interpretation commentary" stands for? We talked like about what happens in the text, where it is and how the author uses language, what is the narration type and his approach to characters (or to the situation in the text, I'm not sure).

Thanks for help :)

Edited by Sceptyczka
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Sounds like your teacher means passage commentary, as in Paper 1.

"Literary commentary" is used to refer to a close reading of a passage that is presented in the form of an essay. You need to explore aspects such as content, technique, style, structure, theme and language.

You are assessed on your ability to:

*demonstrate understanding of the thought and feeling in the passage through interpretation that is supported by detailed references to the passage

* analyse and appreciate how the passage achieves its effects.

There are many acceptable ways of approaching and structuring a literary commentary, of course, but a good commentary explains, rather than merely summarizing content or listing effects. Commentaries should be continuous and developed; commentaries made up of unrelated paragraphs will not score very highly.

If you need more detail, just let me know.

Edited by Blackcurrant
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Yes it can. For paper 1, you receive two options: a short poem (usually no longer than about 40-50 lines) and a piece of prose (just writing) taken from a larger story. Usually that piece of prose is a significant point in the text that has lots of literary features and things to talk about, otherwise they would not have chosen it. When you practice for this in class usually you will work with extracts from your texts that are significant (for example, if you were reading Hamlet you might get an extract on Ophelia's madness scene). It would be impractical and really difficult to work with the entire text because there would be too much to talk about.

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Yes. WT is for Language and Literature (A2 has been phased out and A 1 no longer exists). I took Sceptyczka's question as a broad one, about IB and Written Tasks (WT), when in fact she may have meant something else. Good that you brought this up.

So I'll backtrack a bit.

As there is sometimes confusion about the exact terms and how they are applied, I take it that you (S...) may actually have been referring to the WA when asking about written tasks. Or perhaps, you meant ANY assignment where writing is expected - also covered by the term "written tasks"? It is not clear. Anyway, there it is.

Edited by Blackcurrant
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When talking about the "Literature" course, the biggest IA written assignment is the World Literature essay that I mentioned before. While the previous curriculum involved presenting 2 different types of WL essays, now it has been reduced to only one of them (even for HL, which is what I am taking).

This essay is centered on an aspect of one of the plays that you read for Part 1 of the course.

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