IB Language and Literature

Textual Analysis –

Practice texts & tasks

Introduction

This booklet is designed to introduce you to some of the core skills that you will develop and demonstrate in the IB Language and Literature course. It is also intended to provide you with a better appreciation of the range of non-fiction texts you may encounter in the two Language units that you will undertake. The benefits are three-fold:

Paper 1 examination will present you with an unseen non-fiction text that you must engage with as a critical reader;

Parts 1 and 2 are centred on the reading of a range of non-fiction texts. An oral assessment on each of these contributes to your final mark;

In a nutshell, the more you read and engage with non-fiction texts that we meet in our everyday lives, the better equipped you will be for the demands of the course.

Aim to write 150-200 words in response to each task, with the exception of the last task which should be 300-400 words.

Task 1

Summarise the purpose of this text, using textual detail to support your idea. Extract from ‘The Guardian’ online, Sunday 16th June 2013, by Lucy Siegle.

Observer Ethical Awards 2013: Joanna Lumley – National Campaigner of the Year

From Purdey to Patsy, Joanna Lumley has had her fair share of plum roles. But the one she's most proud of is as a champion for social justice. Lucy Siegle meets the Observer Ethical Awards' 2013 national campaigner of the year

Joanna Lumley treats the lecture hall of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) with a charming degree of reverence. Walking past the hallowed Ondaatje Theatre, which has hosted talks by famous scientists and explorers since 1930, we pop in to pay our respects. Lumley, a fellow of the RGS herself, gave a lecture here on her return from a trip to Bhutan in 2008. "Terrifying," she says in a stage whisper. "Imagine the people, the explorers, the brains that have been associated with this organisation. Shackleton, for example."

Some 35 years before Lumley took to the lectern, her grandmother also addressed the RGS. She was Danish but born in New Zealand and married Lumley's Scottish grandfather in Rangoon. Then there were the Lumleys themselves, based in India, "probably with the East India company". Joanna Lumley was born in what was then known as British India and moved around the world, with stints in Malaysia and boarding school in Kent. "As a child you pack up and move on. Service people around the world know that. Two years, pack up, then make new friends."

But there's a body of evidence that suggests all this moving isn't good for children, that it can affect developmental and educational outcomes. "Well, I'd call that total bollocks," she replies – with great emphasis on the bollocks. "All that affects your outcome is your family. And, actually, if you have a loving family it doesn't matter if you're tied to the back of a raft and dragged around Britain in a storm. If your family loves you, you're fine. What you can't grow up without is love."

Lumley certainly seems to have developed into an open-minded and enthusiastic individual. Before the RGS, we were at the Natural History Museum, where she was photographed in the butterfly house. "I could stay here all day and feel completely at home, making friends with the butterflies," she says.

She would not, she concedes, be quite so at peace hanging around all day at, say, London Fashion Week. She is Marks & Spencer's face of Shwopping – the retailer's drive to conquer waste in fashion retail where every item donated ("shwopped") by customers is re-sold, re-used or recycled by Oxfam – because this is the sort of logical, solutions-oriented approach to style that Lumley favours. Despite being a famous 60s model and former New Avenger, the woman internationally feted for her turnout is not very interested in the fashion industry.

She just finds many other topics more fascinating than fashion. "Actually, I've never understood why I shouldn't be interested in all sorts of things. That's the terrible thing about being a model. For some reason, because you've stood in front of a camera, you can't be interested in Greek archaeology or science. I think becoming a model is one of the hardest things. It was the deepest stain on my career, particularly when I tried to get into acting."

You can see why M&S were keen to sign her as an ambassador for Plan A, its initiative of commitments to combat climate change and waste. "She is integral to the campaign," says Steve Sharp, M&S's marketing chief, "Joanna is true to herself, her passions and beliefs, and she uses her fabulous sense of style and humour in a way our customers can engage with."

Task 2

Who is the intended audience of this text? Look at content, images, language to justify your answer.

Task 3

What do you learn about the time and place presented in the text? How does it inform your understanding of the writer’s purpose?

Extract from ‘Call the Midwife – A true story of the East End in the 1950s’, Jennifer Worth

Why did I ever start this? I must have been mad! There were dozens of other things I could have been – a model, air hostess, or a ship’s stewardess. The ideas run through my head, all glamorous, highly paid jobs. Only an idiot would choose to be a nurse. And now a midwife . . .

Two-thirty in the morning! I struggle, half asleep, into my uniform. Only three hours sleep after a seventeen-hour working day. Who would do such a job? It is bitterly cold and raining outside. Nonnatus House itself is cold enough, and the bicycle shed even colder. In the dark I wrench at a bicycle and crack my shin. Through blind force of habit, I fit my delivery bag on to the bicycle, and push it out into the deserted street.

Round the corner, Leyland Street, across the East India Dock Road and then on to the Isle of Dogs. The rain has woken me up and the steady pedalling calms my temper. Why did I ever go into nursing? My thoughts flit back five or six years. Certainly there had been no feeling of vocation, none of the burning desire to heal the sick that nurses are supposed to feel. What was it then? A broken heart certainly, the need to get away, a challenge, the sexy uniform with the cuffs and ruffs, the pinched-in waists and pert little caps. Were they reasons though? I can’t tell. As for the sexy uniform, that’s a laugh, I think as I pedal through the rain in my navy gabardine, with the cap pulled down well over my head. Sexy, indeed.

Over the first swing bridge that closes off the dry docks. All day they teem with noise and life, as the great vessels are loaded and unloaded. Thousands of men: dockers, stevedores, drivers, pilots, sailors, fitters, crane drivers, all toiling ceaselessly. Now the docks are silent, the only sound is the movement of water. The darkness is intense.

Past the tenements where countless thousands sleep, probably four or five to a bed, in their little two-room flats. Two rooms for a family of ten or twelve children. How do they manage it?

I cycle on, intent on getting to my patient. A couple of policemen wave and call out their greetings; the human contact raises my spirits no end. Nurses and policemen always have a rapport, especially in the East End. It’s interesting, I reflect, that they always go around in pairs for mutual protection. You never see a policeman alone. Yet we nurses and midwives are always alone, on foot or bicycle. We would never be touched. So deep is the respect, even reverence, of the roughest, toughest docker for the district midwives that we can go anywhere alone, day or night, without fear.

The dark unlit road lies before me. The road around the Isle is continuous, but narrow streets lead off it, criss-crossing each other, each containing thousands of terraced houses. The road has a romantic appeal because the sound of the moving river is always present.

Soon I turn off the West Ferry Road into the side streets. I can see my patient’s house at once – the only house with a light on.

Task 4

In the selected paragraphs, how does the writer use language to present bravery and patriotism to the reader?

"Speech at Point Du Hoc"; Point Du Hoc, France, June 6, 1984Ronald Reagan

We're here to mark that day in history when the Allied peoples joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.

We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but forty years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon. At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June 1944, 225 Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs. Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns. The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance.

The Rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers -- at the edge of the cliffs shooting down at them with machine-guns and throwing grenades. And the American Rangers began to climb. They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe. Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After two days of fighting only ninety could still bear arms.

Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there.

These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war. Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender's poem. You are men who in your 'lives fought for life...and left the vivid air signed with your honor'... Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here. You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith, and belief; it was loyalty and love.

The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge -- and pray God we have not lost it -- that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.

You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One's country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.

Task 5

Identify the different stages in the writer’s argument. Bullet point each point that the writer makes in a summarising statement.

There's a right way to deal with hecklers. Then there's Michelle Obama's…David Mitchell (The Observer, Sunday 9 June 2013)

The first lady failed the standup test when a gay rights protester interrupted her speech. But her attitude was refreshing. Michelle Obama had a tough gig last week. She was heckled at a fundraiser by a campaigner called Ellen Sturtz, who explained that: "As the first lady was talking about our children's future and ensuring that they have everything they need to live happy and productive lives, I simply couldn't stay silent any longer." I know what she means – that does sound dreary. It's a familiar feeling: you're listening to a long speech but, for some reason, can't drop off to sleep, so you get fidgety instead.

I listened to the minute or so of Michelle Obama's remarks before Sturtz's interjection and was quite spellbound by how boring it was. She was talking emphatically, and remarkably slowly, about how children matter. Not a controversial notion but, if I'd paid $500 to hear her gradually express it, I might have been irritated enough to take a contrary view. Apparently she'd seen some children in Chicago having a rough time and perhaps thought that, if she made a few minutes of some Democratic donors' lives comparably shit, it might somehow help.

She continued: "And there are so many kids in this country just like them – kids with so much promise, but so few opportunities; good kids who are doing everything they can to break the cycle and to beat the odds." I hate seeing children vandalise bicycles and play online roulette as much as anyone, but there was something in the first lady's leaden delivery that made me refuse to care. Perhaps sensing something forced in the nods and smiles of the crowd, she went on: "Sorry, I'm boring myself now. Why don't I sit down and we can get stuck into the catering?"

She didn't say that. Instead, she got more animated on the subject of children and their widely accepted non-irrelevance: "Those kids, they are the reason we're here. And today, we need to be better for them. Not for us – for them! We need to be better for all of our children do you under-, our kids" – and elicited some weary whoops from the crowd. Maybe I'm being unfair – maybe all fundraiser speeches are like this. Maybe Michelle Obama is the Cicero of the genre. But I can't imagine standing in that crowd, listening to the obvious being stated more slowly than rust develops, without musing that this must be how political assassins get their motivation.

That's when Ellen Sturtz intervened. But she wasn't calling on Mrs Obama to stop droning on – she wanted to join in the debate. She was incensed that President Obama has yet to honour his 2008 commitment to sign an executive order barring discrimination by federal contractors based on sexual orientation. Sturtz, who described herself as an "old, grey-haired lesbian", said afterwards: "I'm looking ahead at a generation of young people who could live full, honest, and open lives with the stroke of the president's pen." So she wasn't bored, she was engaged; she was angry, but she was gripped. Maybe you had to be there.

Unfortunately Mrs Obama didn't welcome this surprising sign of will-to-live retention by an audience member. "Wait, wait," she said. "One of the things that I don't do…" and then she paused, "well," she continued, "is this." The pause is interesting – a first for the speech. I reckon she'd considered responding with an "I don't do this." The first lady doesn't do hecklers, just like Mariah Carey doesn't do stairs. Or is that Daleks? Or does she insist on Daleks? Or is that kittens? Anyway, my hunch is that, at the last minute, Mrs O decided to commute an "I'm not standing for this" to a more passive-aggressive "I'm not very good at this." It certainly became clear that she meant the former. She left the podium and confronted Sturtz, saying: "Listen to me, or you can take the mic but I'm leaving."

Ellen's response is not recorded but the crowd was for Michelle pressing on, which she did. "So let me make the

point that I was making before," she resumed unhurriedly. "We are here for our kids. So we must recapture that passion, the same urgency and energy…" Ellen Sturtz, meanwhile, was being escorted out, which puts her ahead of the game in my book.

How well did Mrs Obama deal with the encounter? White House press secretary Jay Carney was unequivocal: "It's my personal opinion that she handled it brilliantly." And that's his personal opinion. He's not just saying that because he thinks it would be politic. My personal opinion is that she coped with it badly.

Audiences are nervous creatures. They're apt to worry about the performers they're watching. If a performer wants them to listen, laugh, be moved, agree or clap, his priority must be minimising their fretting by radiating confidence and comfort. Betraying genuine anger, distress or alarm is the worst thing you can do. It won't necessarily make the audience dislike you – but it will make them fear for you, which is worse. So, when heckled, it's important to seem calm. If you can think of a zinger put-down, great – but you don't need one. Your greater visibility and audibility will easily carry the day as long as you don't let the crowd think you've been rattled.

But saying you're not good at dealing with heckles, vacating the performing space and then offering to cede the microphone to the heckler if the audience doesn't beg you to stay is a terrible response. It's like when someone starts telling a story and then stops crossly because they think no one's listening. Social convention forces the group to beg them to continue, but the anecdote can then only be received with feigned relish. Of course the Democrat donors, excited to meet the first lady, called on her to continue, but the atmosphere will have been awkward thereafter.

The fact that, as the president's wife, anything Michelle Obama says must be free from all but the most uncontroversial sentiments would be enough to make Nicholas Parsons fall out of love with the sound of his own voice. Still, she doesn't strike me as a natural performer. She's been thrust unwillingly into the limelight, given a platform she didn't want so that, when someone tries to hijack it, her reaction is: "Fine, take it – I'm not here for my health."

The flaws in her performance technique are glaring but, for a public figure, her attitude is more unusual and refreshing than anything she'll ever be allowed to say.

Task 6

How does the writer establish a tone of voice in each of these extracts? Consider use of features such as irony, hyperbole, pathos, vitriol, reverence (look up the words you don’t know from this list).

Extract 1

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working --bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming--all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned--reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone--one mind less, one world less.

Extract 2

Blackpool – and I don’t care how many times you hear this, it never stops being amazing - attracts more visitors every year than Greece and has more holiday beds than the whole of Portugal. It consumes more chips per capita than anywhere else on the planet. (It gets through forty acres of potatoes a day.) It has the largest concentration of roller-coasters in Europe. It has the continent's second most popular tourist attraction, the forty-two-acre Pleasure Beach, whose 6.5 million annual visitors are exceeded in number only by those going to the Vatican. It has the most famous illuminations. And on Friday and Saturday nights it has more public toilets than anywhere else in Britain; elsewhere they call them doorways.

Whatever you may think of the place, it does what it does very well - or if not very well at least very successfully. In the past twenty years, during a period in which the number of Britons taking traditional seaside holidays has declined by a fifth, Blackpool has increased its visitor numbers by 7 per cent and built tourism into a £250-million-a-year industry - no small achievement when you consider the British climate, the fact that Blackpool is ugly, dirty and a long way from anywhere, that its sea is an open toilet, and its attractions nearly all cheap, provincial and dire.

It was the illuminations that had brought me there. I had been hearing and reading about them for so long that I was genuinely keen to see them. So, after securing a room in a modest guesthouse on a back street, I hastened to the front in a sense of some expectation. Well, all I can say is that Blackpool's illuminations are nothing if not splendid, and they are not splendid. There is, ofcourse, always a danger of disappointment when you finally encounter something you have wanted to see for a long time, but in terms of letdown it would be hard to exceed Blackpool's light show. I thought there would be lasers sweeping the sky, strobe lights tattooing the clouds and other gasp-making dazzlements. Instead there was just a rumbling procession of old trams decorated as rocket ships or Christmas crackers, and several miles of paltry decorations on lampposts. I suppose if you had never seen electricity in action, it would be pretty breathtaking, but I'm not even sure of that. It all just seemed tacky and inadequate on rather a grand scale, like Blackpool itself.

Extract 3

"Diana was the very essence of compassion, of duty, of style, of beauty. All over the world she was a symbol of selfless humanity. All over the world, a standard bearer for the rights of the truly downtrodden, a very British girl who transcended nationality. Someone with a natural nobility who was classless and who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic.

"Today is our chance to say thank you for the way you brightened our lives, even though God granted you but half a life. We will all feel cheated always that you were taken from us so young and yet we must learn to be grateful that you came along at all. Only now that you are gone do we truly appreciate what we are now without and we want you to know that life without you is very, very difficult.

.......................

"There is no doubt that she was looking for a new direction in her life at this time. She talked endlessly of getting away from England, mainly because of the treatment that she received at the hands of the newspapers. I don't think she ever understood why her genuinely good intentions were sneered at by the media, why there appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf to bring her down. It is baffling. "My own and only explanation is that genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum. It is a point to remember that of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this - a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end the most hunted person of the modern age.

Task 7&8 Comparative (see below)

TEXT 1:

Hunt for Gas Hits Fragile Soil, and South Africans Fear Risks

Liaan Pretorius for The New York Times

Chris Hayward, a South African farmer, says, "If our government lets these companies touch even a drop of our water, we're ruined."

By IAN URBINA Published: December 30, 2011 144 Comments

KAROO, South Africa — When a drought dried up their wells last year, hundreds of farmers and their families flocked to local fairgrounds here to pray for rain, and a call went out on the regional radio station imploring South Africans to donate bottled water.

Covering much of the roughly 800 miles between Johannesburg and Cape Town, this arid expanse — its name means “thirsty land” — sees less rain in some parts than the Mojave Desert.

Even so, Shell and several other large energy companies hope to drill thousands of natural gas wells in the region, using a new drilling technology that can require a million gallons of water or more for each well. Companies will also have to find a way to dispose of all the toxic wastewater or sludge that each well produces, since the closest landfill or industrial-waste facility that can handle the waste is hundreds of miles away.

“Around here, the rain comes on legs,” said Chris Hayward, 51, a brawny, dust-covered farmer in Beaufort West, quoting a Karoo saying about how rare and fleeting precipitation is in the area.

With his three skinny border collies crouching dutifully at his side, Mr. Hayward explained that he had to slaughter more than 600 of his 2,000 sheep last year because there was not enough water to go around.

“If our government lets these companies touch even a drop of our water,” he said, “we’re ruined.”

South Africa is among the growing number of countries that want to unlock previously inaccessible natural gas reserves trapped in shale deep underground. The drilling technology — hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” for short — holds the promise of generating new revenue through taxes on the gas, creating thousands of jobs for one of the country’s poorest regions, and fueling power plants to provide electricity to roughly 10 million South Africans who live without it.

But many of the sites here and on other continents that are being considered for drilling by oil and gas companies and by governments short of cash are in fragile areas where local officials have limited resources, political leverage or experience to ensure that the drilling is done safely.

TEXT 2:

Boundless South Africa

http://www.sanparks.org/assets/docs/e-brochures/tankwa_online_brochure_2012.pdf

Task 7:

Compare the purpose and intended audience of the two texts, drawing on similarities and differences in your response.

Task 8:

Compare how the writers of the two texts use language and presentation/ layout to communicate with their reader (300-400 words).