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The International Baccalaureate Program in English, Higher Level, is a program in four parts. As a junior in this class, you will completing Parts 1 and 4. You will complete parts 2 and 3 as a senior next year.

This year--and to satisfy the IB requirements for Part 1--you will read Camus' The Stranger, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate

This year--and to satisfy IB requirements for Part 4--you will read Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises

For your IB oral you want to keep in mind a few very specific ideas.

Your oral is to be no longer than 15 minutes. This is 10 minutes of you speaking uninterruptedly and 5 minutes of the “audience” asking you questions to which you will respond. Once 10 minutes has come, I will literally cut you off and begin the question-and-answer session. You will be graded according to what is presented, not what would have been presented. Ideally, you should shoot for about 9 ½ minutes so that you have a few seconds for nervousness. You should rehearse your presentation numerous times.

The audience, during question and answer sessions, is to keep its questions to the specific topic at hand, is not to engage the speaker in debate (but may ask challenging and clarifying questions), and is to be respectful of the hard work and time that has gone into the speaker’s presentation.

You will look to the rubric for grading guidelines/expectations provided by IB. On the IB rubric you receive after your presentation, you will notice my comments directly reflect IB guidelines as well as extend to more critical commentary at times.

Each speaker will have a visual that accompanies his presentation. This visual should be pertinent to the matter at hand and can be as elaborate as the speaker wishes. Some suggestions are as follows: poster(s); costuming; music; powerpoint; staging/props; performance; brochure.

Each speaker will have an outline, created by him for his specific presentation. There will be enough copies for each student in the class and for the teacher. The magic number is 38. This outline, like the visual, should be relevant to the presentation, but should not “be” the presentation; the outline, in other words, should not be a full account of the ideas to be presented, of what will be said to the audience, but should be, instead, the major points, page citations (and/or text spelled out), and any other information you feel is deemed pertinent for an abstracted view of what the audience will see through the presentation. A presenter will never read from his outline.

Each speaker will prepare a properly formatted (MLA) Works Consulted page of all sources looked at and used in the construction of the presentation. Yes, outside sources will be used. Check out an MLA handbook (6^th edition) from the textbook room; it will come in handy all year long. You are required to consult a minimum of ten sources of some relevance to your topic, four of which will not be internet based. Each presenter will be visiting a library, most presumably CSUF, to assist in this endeavor.

Each speaker will seek my approval of his topic choice at least one week in advance of the scheduled presentation.

Your presentation should be something “cool,” “neato,” “interesting beyond the surface,” and of some interest to you if it is going to be at all interesting to your audience. Remember that you can go in any direction you want from the work you have chosen to present for.

The text of focus is to be an integral part of the presentation. This means, each presenter, in choosing a vein of focus, will without fail draw attention to the pertinent parts of the text that exemplify or qualify the material found through research. Such references to the text will be absolutely specific, will be delivered by way of directly reading passages from the focus text and by drawing direct and specific references to the focus text. For example, if I were doing an IB Oral presentation regarding the presence and function of superstition and mythology in Oedipus the King I would go out, get a bunch of critical essays/articles (literary criticism) about this topic as it pertains to the play, put all the information together in a coherent manner, and then I would (or as I was finding this research I would) go through the play’s text and actually “prove” all the research correct by extracting text that illustrates the points made through said research. In essence, I would construct a verbal essay, except that instead of all my own ideas I would be allowed to use, “steal,” and pilfer in part the ideas of others to make all my big points.

One way to “find” a topic for an IB Oral presentation is in fact to do a bunch of research on the focus text and see what others say about it, what topics are related to it, and so on. When you look to the web for The Great Gatsby, as an example, you will find that connected research topics are automobiles in early 20^th century America, prohibition and alcohol use, the changing role of women, the Jazz Age/the Roaring 20s, color symbolism, and so on.