The English A Individual Oral is the internal assessment component of both Language and Literature and Literature courses, worth 20% of the final grade. Unlike a written IA, it’s a spoken, largely unscripted 15-minute assessment (roughly a 10-minute presentation followed by 5 minutes of teacher questions), which makes structure and preparation even more critical — you can’t rely on editing after the fact.
The Core Requirement: A Global Issue
Your entire Individual Oral is built around a single global issue — a real-world concern with international relevance (identity, power, culture, beliefs and values, health, and so on) — explored through one literary work and one non-literary body of work you’ve studied during the course.
The most common mistake is choosing a global issue that’s too broad («conflict») instead of a specific, arguable angle («how personal guilt shapes an individual’s response to wartime conflict»). A precise global issue makes the entire structure of your oral easier to build and far more convincing to examiners.
Recommended Structure (10-Minute Presentation)
- Introduction (30-60 seconds) — state your global issue clearly and name your two works.
- Extract 1 analysis (3-4 minutes) — analyze your chosen extract from the literary work, showing how the author uses specific literary/stylistic techniques to present the global issue.
- Extract 2 analysis (3-4 minutes) — analyze your chosen extract from the non-literary body of work, showing how form, structure, and technique present the same global issue from a different angle.
- Comparative link (1-2 minutes) — explicitly compare how the two works approach the global issue differently or similarly; this comparative step is where many students lose marks by treating the two extracts as separate mini-essays instead of a connected argument.
- Conclusion (30 seconds) — briefly restate your overall argument about how both works illuminate the global issue.
The Follow-Up Discussion (5 Minutes)
After your presentation, your teacher will ask questions to explore your understanding further — often pushing you to justify a claim, consider a counterargument, or connect your analysis to a broader part of the work you didn’t cover. Preparing for this section means genuinely understanding your whole work, not just the two extracts you selected.
How to Choose Strong Extracts
- Choose extracts (usually no more than 2 pages / an equivalent visual extract) that are rich in identifiable technique — imagery, structure, tone, rhetorical devices — not just narratively important.
- Make sure both extracts connect clearly and specifically to your stated global issue; a loose or generic connection is one of the most common reasons for a lower mark.
- For the non-literary extract, choose a work with a clear, analyzable form (a speech, an article, an advertisement, a documentary still) rather than something too vague to discuss technically.
Common Mistakes That Lower the Score
- A global issue that’s too broad or too narrow to sustain 10 minutes of specific analysis
- Treating the oral as two disconnected mini-essays instead of a single comparative argument
- Summarizing plot instead of analyzing technique
- Reading from a full script instead of speaking from bullet-point notes (examiners can tell, and it affects the «Understanding, Interpretation and Analysis» criterion less directly, but it dramatically weakens delivery and connection with your argument)
Preparation Tips
Practice your presentation aloud multiple times using only note cards, not a full script. Record yourself and check that your comparative link is explicit and appears clearly, not just implied. Time yourself — going significantly under or over 10 minutes signals uneven preparation to your teacher and, indirectly, to the moderating examiner.