IB Docs (2) Team
Individual Oral Commentary (HL) Death of a Naturalist
Poems are often a good choice for Part 4 texts and for the IOC. Whilst poems exist in dialogic interplay with other texts, they are in a certain sense self-contained. It is likely that a poem studied in class has been closely scrutinized. And, although it may be somewhat contentious to suggest this, the intimate attention poems demand may benefit students who are asked to discuss a poem in their IOC.
Here, in this practice IOC, a student presents her ideas on Seamus Heaney’s early poem ‘Death of a Naturalist’.
The course study guide does not prescribe or proscribe a particular approach to the IOC. That is, teachers are not instructed on how an IOC should or must be approached. Should a student take a chronological, sequential approach to a text? This mirrors the process of initial reading, so there seems to be some validity to this approach. Alternatively, should a student identify a few main points, and use these ideas to structure and organize their discussion?
There is no ‘correct’ answer to this choice, and it is possible that a student may do a bit of both. In my (David’s) own teaching, I work with the second approach: Identify a few key points (three or four, say) and use these as an edifice to explore the text (or text extract). Despite what you teach, however, you will know that students sometimes remain inclined, for better or worse, to do their own thing. In this IOC, the student has gone her own way, and taken an entirely chronological approach. As you listen, you may like to consider what is won and what is lost in this approach.
The InThinking Language and Literature website contains many marked IOC samples. This IOC is unmarked. However, there is a short discussion of the student’s approach, and you may wish to think about how far you agree or disagree with what is written.
Sample Extract/Passage
Sample Individual Oral Commentary
Discussion
This is a bright and talented student. She shows a good knowledge of the ways in which poetry establishes meaning and effect. However, the approach the student takes seems to delimit the depth of insight she reveals. She appears to ‘skim’ the poem, and there is a sense of ‘listing’. This is not to suggest that she fails to discuss effect(s); often she does. The points she makes, however, are not always coherent, and there is a sense in which she revisits points without making a sustained argument. To take just one example, she mentions several times the idea of ‘decay’, but really doesn’t meld her ideas together in a cohesive way. Could ‘decay’ have been a key point, and could the student have explored more fully the reemergence and significance of ‘decay’ throughout the entire poem?
The student attempts a close analysis of the poem. This is no bad thing! Nevertheless, there is also a sense in which the student’s sequential, word-by-word, line-by-line approach is – almost inevitably – superficial. Since this is a practice IOC, it is allowed to go over the fifteen-minute limit. Even allowing for this, the student is unable to cover the whole poem. In other words, in endeavoring to discuss everything, the student is almost unavoidably limited in her analysis. If the student, for example, wishes to discuss punctuation, it isn’t necessary to discuss every instance of this.
The student in attending to detail seems also to miss more holistic points she may make about the poem. Arguably, she may have done so with more time – but it isn’t time she has available. When asked about the organization of the poem into two stanzas, she seems to struggle, although the structure of the poem is surely noteworthy.
In the last analysis, teachers must decide how best to approach the IOC. They must teach this to students and allow considerable opportunity to practice this. The IOC is intellectually and emotionally challenging, and students need to be well prepared, with a clear sense of how to organize their commentary. To my mind, a wholly sequential approach is ineffective, as this very able student seems to reveal.
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