A1 IOP helpp!

[peanut butter and jelly]

hey guys!

i really need help. i have my IOP in two days and dont know where to start from. The literature we are suppose to use include:

1.carol ann duffy poems

2.master harold and the boys - its a play

any suggestions? please help! thanks

[Sandwich]

Do you mean the formal one with your teacher or the one you give to the class?

[peanut butter and jelly]

the formal one with the teacher if it were with the class i wouldnt be this nervous!

[sweetnsimple786]

PB&J--Hey. Okay I'm confused. You're doing an oral presentation but presenting only to your teacher? That sounds like the commentary except you said that you have do prepare something with the works you've read, so you're doing the IOP, but it's not in front of everyone?

Anyways, we can't really give you your topic, but we can help you. And I can't really do much because I haven't read the works. I recall this blue sheet my teacher gave with four categories that we could probably do your IOP on. It was like literary features, characters/relationships, plot development, and something else. My teacher said to stay away from themes though. You usually can't present original enough ideas.

What I looked for was something that people wouldn't immediately notice or disregard for whatever reason. It had to be something I was interested in exploring, and it had to have significance. "So what? So what that I noticed this thing? Why is it relevant to us today? Why should we care? What can we learn from this?" That kind of thing. The answer wasn't obvious at first. If it's obvious to everyone, that just might defeat the purpose.

So what I suggest you do is look through the poems first. Pick some poems you liked more than the rest and try to find something subtle about them that you can relate back to your play.

Like I said, that's what I'd do. That's certainly not what you have to do. Here's a thread that you'd probably find useful to spark some ideas. http://www.ibsurvival.com/topic/4726-english-iop/

Also, there are a lot of threads asking for IOP advice. Read through them because they might provide more insight than I have. You'll notice near the bottom of the page when you're looking at all of the threads in the Language A1 forum a thin navy blue bar that says 'Click here to show filter options' you might need to adjust it to see some more posts. Good luck.

One last thing, I know you're desperate for help, but this forum's organization is pretty amazing. When you make a new thread or post something, a lot of people usually see it. Posting the same thing numerous times can be like using all caps, ya know?

Edited December 31, 2009 by sweetnsimple786

[Sandwich]

Well if it's the one with your teacher (i.e. the oral commentary), ideally you'd want a practice to get rid of your nerves and let you know how to handle things in that situation. Not essential, though, so no worries if you don't have one.

The big things to remember with the oral commentary are:

1. Show context and background knowledge

2. Pick out literary features as you would in any essay and say them out loud no matter how thick you feel say them

You're obviously SL if you're only doing two things for your IOP, sooo you basically want to have the knowledge to be able to say what is going on, when it's going on, and analyse around 30 lines of it just like you would in a normal written unseen commentary. The only difference is that you're saying it, not speaking it, and that it's not unseen so you're expected to know stuff!

Say somebody opened that play to page.. I dunno, 23, and took the whole page and then asked you to speak about it for 10 minutes (or however long the IOP is, I forget). Could you fill them in very precisely on what's going on, whereabouts in the play it is, what's happened before, why the author has written it with respect to their intent as to what will happen afterwards, what important thing is happening in that section (you'll only be given sections with something commentable happening in them, so there should be some sort of event or twist or plot thing to talk about), how the characters are being portrayed (and again, context -- is that how they're usually portrayed? Are they being portrayed like this in this particular section for a reason which will become evident later, or is it the culmination of something etc.?) and so on. Then you'll also want to be able to talk through it as a commentary, so literary features. In plays this often means figures of speech and how they'd sound when you say them out loud (definitely mention the genre very briefly) and stage directions, accent, props, bits of theatre or set etc.

Obviously you have to treat poems slightly different, but you still need context and it's useful to be aware of whatever poems they are in the context of a larger body of work. Not as in you need to know more than just the poems you've studied, but if you're given one poem, it's a good idea to be able to say "Oh and Carol Anne Duffy uses this theme in her other poem BLAH to the same/a different effect + comment on how effective it is" and so on. Context is a different sort of thing, but you still need it.

Best way to prepare for it is to make sure you know the chronology, main themes, characters and plot of the play well. Same with the poems, look through them and if you went through them in your lessons, try to remember what was picking out as being significant, literary features etc. You will need to mention literary features in both play and poem commentaries, dependent on which you get, but obviously you're going to say more about plot in the play one and lit. features in the poem one, unless you have a ballad/story poem or something!

You have a period to prepare beforehand and my advice is to go through it chronologically and just mark the whole thing up with all the ideas you can think of for every line, and link it all together so if you spot something in say line 7 of your extract and line 27, you have made yourself aware of it so when you get to line 7 in your commentary, you can drag in line 27 and so on to give your oral commentary a bit of structure.

Good luck