sweetnsimple786 Posted July 20, 2009 Report Share Posted July 20, 2009 What did you "spontaneously" talk about during your 10 minute orals?I took Spanish and discussed the importance of the hand fan [el abanico] in allowing women to show what they were thinking through gestures. Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peachez Posted July 20, 2009 Report Share Posted July 20, 2009 That sounds interesting.I have not done my orals yet.. not looking forward to those either... Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dark Matter Posted July 20, 2009 Report Share Posted July 20, 2009 (edited) For ours our teacher showed us a picture and we talked about it. Then she gradually moved into normal conversation and asked us questions. If we ever ran out of something to say she just inched the conversation to something else. So like for mine we talked about traveling and food that I liked.Though maybe it is different for Language B ... I just realized that mine was Inito, so that may make a difference ... Edited July 20, 2009 by Dark Matter Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sandwich Posted July 20, 2009 Report Share Posted July 20, 2009 I managed to ramble my way into inventing my own 'spontaneous' topic (phew) and started talking about global health inequalities. My friend screwed up and accidentally mentioned something she had zero vocab for and got really, really stuck in that section of the oral, so I was crossing my fingers and toes my teacher would let me 'invent' my own! Fortunately it worked.I think teachers do a lot of this very differently. For instance, the people who did German B at our school got to pick every single topic they wanted to come up! Spanish B was pot luck, you had to hope the teacher might tack on to something you mentioned yourself, but otherwise she literally picked a topic out of the hat Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Abu Posted July 20, 2009 Report Share Posted July 20, 2009 Ab initio is the one in which the teacher shows a picture and you need to talk about it.For my B oral, I prepared something to talk about for about 4-5 minutes. You usually need to talk about something related to the culture of the language B. Since I was doing French, I compared Lebanese cuisine and French cuisine since they're both Francophone countries. After the first 4-5 minutes, my teacher asked me about my presentation and then talked about general stuff. Stuff like global warming and the youth of today if I remember correctly. Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
sweetnsimple786 Posted July 20, 2009 Author Report Share Posted July 20, 2009 (edited) I think teachers do a lot of this very differently. For instance, the people who did German B at our school got to pick every single topic they wanted to come up! Spanish B was pot luck, you had to hope the teacher might tack on to something you mentioned yourself, but otherwise she literally picked a topic out of the hat For my B oral, I prepared something to talk about for about 4-5 minutes. You usually need to talk about something related to the culture of the language B. Since I was doing French, I compared Lebanese cuisine and French cuisine since they're both Francophone countries. After the first 4-5 minutes, my teacher asked me about my presentation and then talked about general stuff. Stuff like global warming and the youth of today if I remember correctly.I'm fairly certain that the 2-3 minutes spent talking about personal questions was taken verbatim from a beauty contest questionnaire. bahahaI spent at least 2 minutes talking about what I would do if I were president for a day so that she wouldn't have time to ask me more questions. [by the way, hint for people who haven't done their orals yet. The more you talk during questioning time, the better. If you can understand the question your teacher asked you, then elaborate as much as possible. This will decrease the probability of your teacher asking you questions you aren't sure of!] Edited August 26, 2009 by sweetnsimple786 Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
moneyfaery Posted July 20, 2009 Report Share Posted July 20, 2009 I... forget. I think it was something about malbouffe and l'obésité in France. I had a wonderful part planned out for part I, but once I got into the room, my mind went blank and I ended up making stuff up. Part II was pretty much the teacher prodding me for points as I had blanked out. By the last part, I had relaxed enough to answer the spontaneous questions, which was imo the best part haha. Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
godofib Posted July 21, 2009 Report Share Posted July 21, 2009 I do not quite understand how these orals work...do we get to prepare some parts of it before hand and then the rest of it spontaneous? Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sandwich Posted July 21, 2009 Report Share Posted July 21, 2009 I do not quite understand how these orals work...do we get to prepare some parts of it before hand and then the rest of it spontaneous?Technically all of it is meant to be spontaneous, but how it usually works is that you give a 3-4 minute 'speech' (which is never spontaneous, everybody learns it off by heart beforehand and then pretends to be spontaneous about it), which is then followed by questions on your speech (if you have a nice teacher, you'll have been able to prepare the questions beforehand, if you don't, you will have to guess at what they might ask you). After this comes the remaining 10 or so minutes in which the teacher can ask you whatever they want (again, nice teachers might warn you!). Your best bet is to answer their questions as long and fully as you can to show off your skill in whatever language it happens to be, and also prevent them asking a question you might not understand. So the non-spontaneous bits really depend on your teacher. For most people, it's probably just the speech - or the speech and the questions. Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
sweetnsimple786 Posted July 21, 2009 Author Report Share Posted July 21, 2009 If your teacher or the IB moderator knows that you memorized any part of your oral, you get major marks off. It is all supposed to be spontaneous, but some teachers are...lenient heheThere are two parts to the IA. The are both oral. The first one is the oral that we've been talking about here. It's about 10 minutes long. You speak about a subject for 2-4 minutes. Then the teacher asks you questions about your subject for 2-3 minutes. Then the teacher asks you random/personal questions for the remainder of the time. The second part of the IA is done with the rest of your class. My class did a 'banquet' where we picked one well-known Spanish person and acted as them for about 40 minutes. We interacted with the rest of the class, asking them who they are, what they did--biographical stuff. We all made food native to the country of the person we were portraying. It was a lot of fun! Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
deissi Posted July 22, 2009 Report Share Posted July 22, 2009 My oral was about the implementation of digital television in Finland, and I touched upon its effects on the Swedish-speakers' TV channel. My lang B was Swedish (SL) and I got 29/30 for the oral (moderated). Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
ADH Posted March 23, 2010 Report Share Posted March 23, 2010 I talked about this History of Chocolate. It was a really interesting topic. I didn't know that it had originated with the Mayas and Aztecs. Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
bLub Posted March 27, 2010 Report Share Posted March 27, 2010 language B - higher level: talked about the environment in my presentation, then my teacher asked me general stuff about this topic and then moved on to a general conversation; i.e. my future plans, what I think about education (which subjects should be compulsory/optional...) Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
DJ CAS Posted March 27, 2010 Report Share Posted March 27, 2010 I did mine on the increase in births in France.Our school makes us prepare a 30 page dossier of a topic of our choosing which is a lot of work but prepares us well for the orals. Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peachez Posted March 27, 2010 Report Share Posted March 27, 2010 (edited) Earlier when posting on this thread I mentioned that I haven't done the orals yet. Well, now I have and I am so glad to be done!I talked about ballet and various performances. Touched on some other dance styles, and then the conversation went on about my personal connection to the topic I chose, friends, future plans, etc. Edited March 27, 2010 by Peachez Reply Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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