Paper 1 is a written examination based on the five language B themes. Students are provided with three situations along with choices for text types they can create in response to any one of those situations.
Give your students a headstart with improving their writing skills for paper 1 with these interactive templates!
Helping your students ace Paper 1
Paper 1 assesses the student’s productive skills across three criteria – language, message, and conceptual understanding. When supporting students in their preparation for Paper 1, here are some crucial aspects you should focus on:
- How to produce a relevant text type to respond to a given situation
- How to develop a conceptual understanding of the situation
Select and produce a relevant text type
The first step for students towards producing a written response is choosing a situation. You will find a list of text types, along with samples, that students would need to be familiarised with here. Consider these strategies to help your students develop writing skills to master the different text types:
Developing conceptual understanding
Concepts in the language B course help students understand why and how people use language to communicate. Conceptual understanding of the situation in Paper 1 refers to the audience, message, purpose, context, and variation, as illustrated below:
Students’ abilities to read, write, and speak will gain nuance when you teach them how audience, purpose, meaning, variation, place, and time relate to what is being communicated. You can guide students toward showing their conceptual understanding of a text through their written responses. When writing, ask them to think about the audience, for example. How would an author write for a different audience? How would they change what they are writing if it were for their teacher instead of a friend? When you ask students questions like these you help them develop skills to produce effective texts themselves. You also help them reflect on these different concepts. Take a look at some of the sample questions in the table below to get your students thinking about the conceptual understanding of a situation. You may also like to use these samples to make your own!
Share these interactive templates with your students to help them structure written text types better and improve their writing skills!
Exemplar marking activity
To understand how to implement the paper 1 assessment criteria, check out the exemplars and mark schemes provided here. It would be best if you marked the samples before you take a look at the feedback and final grade. Use the SL and HL rubrics provided. Once you finish marking, take a look at the annotated rubric we have provided. To reflect, ask yourself:
- Were there any differences between your assessment and that of the exemplar?
- Have you changed your mind about what a successfully written task looks like?
You may also like to undertake this activity with your students!
Summary
Here is a quick overview of Paper 1 requirements for both HL and SL: