IOP Guide A Guide on How to Do a Decent IOP
Prepared by Jake
This guide is made pretty much to give you a good guide on how to pick a topic, find quotes for that topic and on doing your speech, all from personal experience.
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What is the IOP? IOP stands for Individual Oral Presentation and is a requirement of your IB English Course whether you do Standard of Higher Level English. The IOP counts for 15% of your final English mark meaning that it alone is worth one of your 7 possible points to be gained from English. The IOP is marked out of 30 and that result is halved and that is used to determine your percentage that you receive due to that assessment piece. So what do you have to do for your IOP you may ask? Well, you need to be able to deliver a 12 minute fully prepared oral presentation and then answer three minutes of questions to give a total of 15 minutes of speaking for your oral presentation. This is a big requirement but definitely not impossible. All you have to do is be prepared beforehand and know what you are going to talk about.
First up I will cover how to choose a topic, and what sort of topics you are allowed. I will only be covering comparative IOP’s as that is what we were informed to be the best choice of presentation style to do. The other styles you can do are a commentary or a presentation on a single text. My reasons for not doing those two are they are a lot more work and a lot more potential for failure if you do not put the work in on the others and that there is no greater return on the other two styles. Also why do an Oral Commentary before the IOC.
But if you want to do one in either of those styles, then these tips still apply just they may be less helpful and there will be some irrelevant stuff.
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How to Pick a Topic
Firstly read all your texts or try as hard as you can to read them all. This may sound like a dumb thing to say but teachers seem to have a knack for picking texts that irritate you so much you just don’t want to read them. When I did my IOP there was a series of poems by an Australian Author we were meant to read but I just found them so boring I skimmed over them and only really tried to analyse one. Next find your favourite texts. If your teachers are nice, you would have had a collection of short stories. Select out of your texts your favourites and read through them again and note any similarities in themes, style etc and take note of them. I was lucky in that one of my texts was a collection of short stories, and I really liked one of the stories out of there. So what I did was pick one of the prevailing themes from the text, which was emotional abuse on children and looked for texts that had similar themes in them. In another short story from the same collection I found the same sort of theme but it also included women. So from this I decided on the topic of: “How the authors used emotional abuse to control the development of women and children within society.”
The most important thing with the topic is that it has to allow for you to be able to compare between the texts and so it is essential both texts do contain your topic. Now I know mine was about a theme but there are many types of topics you can have. - Symbolism - Imagery - A theme - Use of a Literary Device and many more
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Be imaginative. Do something your marker hasn’t heard before, you’ll get better marks if you can back it up with evidence than if you simply steal one you’ve heard of being done before. Personally the topic doesn’t make up much of your mark. Your evidence, understanding, and practice is what brings in the marks. The most important thing to do with your topic is ask a teacher about it and see what they think about it, because your teachers will want to make sure you get the best mark that you possibly can.
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How to Get Evidence What is evidence first off? Evidence is quotes from your text which you use to base an argument on. Think of it like a law court. You can’t prove anything without evidence and some evidence is harder hitting than others but melded together it can form a strong case for what you are saying. So what do you look for? Do you just rip everything out of the book that could relate to your topic and throw it on the page? You could, but there are marks for structure and there is no way you can have a succinct argument with a structure like that. So what you need to do is structure your evidence. Firstly break up your topic into about 3 sub-topics. That is what I did. My subtopics were the Portrayal of Society, the construction of family and the language used against the individual. These were three different subtopics each looking at the reasons the author was presenting for the abuse. Next go and find quotes from your two texts (or three if you’re using short texts like poems). About 4-5 quotes from each text for each subtopic is good and will allow for cutting of quotes later on as you get a better feeling for your argument. For your final presentation you will want about three to four quotes per text per point. This gives plenty of time for explanation, purpose and effect, and linking of quotes to the other texts or previous points.
When you have your quotes write out in your own words the purpose and effect of each of the quotes and how they relate to your subtopic and overall topic and any linkages you can make between quotes. This helps as it will allow you to find quotes you may have missed or for you to prune out weak quotes.
What you need to do next is to prepare a PowerPoint to put your quotes and other stuff in to allow for you to refer to in your presentation.
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Making the PowerPoint The PowerPoint is what you use to structure your talk and put your quotes on. Nothing more. If you put your entire speech on there, you will do poorly because it’s meant to be a talk not a read, in that you will not put out any eye contact and will start to talk in a monotone. My suggested format for the PowerPoint is as follows 1. Title 2. Introduction to Recording -
Name
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Candidate Number
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The texts you are doing
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Style of presentation
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Your topic
3. Introduction -
Texts
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Setting (explain differences between texts)
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Topic (You will explain what it means)
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Any other stuff you think may be useful in here to introduce your argument
4. Areas of Inquiry -
List your subtopics (You will explain how these relate to your topic)
Body Slides Your quotes with maybe a brief explanation in the notes down the bottom, however it should just be your quotes. Final Slide 5. Conclusion Your basic findings which you will back up by explanation and relating back to text.
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Doing Your Presentation What you need to do is for the weeks leading up practice your IOP in front of friends etc. and get them to comment on it as well as see how you feel about your arguments. If you feel you need to replace or cut quotes, modify arguments, whatever you feel you need to do to make your IOP better. Some good things I found to do were perform it in front of friends and get them to mark it. Record yourself and mark it (or in my case count the number of ‘umms’; in one IOC practice I had 94 in 5 min). The simple thing you need to do is practice make it so you know your argument that well you could do it at any moment with no preparation.
Some important things to consider for arguments -
Purpose and Effect
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My Teachers Favourite, Ask yourself so what? after every quote
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Make links
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Compare your texts, Your IOP must be one succinct talk not two separate ones in 15min
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Make conclusions
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Read your books often
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Know your books
The last two relate to your last three minutes of your IOP where the examiner will ask you questions and you will have to answer them. These questions are not made to trick you they are used to tease out those last remaining pieces of information that you have and if you have a good knowledge you can give good answers that can easily pull you up two or three marks as well as giving you a chance to sure up weak points
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On the Day of Your IOP Get to school early and avoid unreliable forms of transport if possible. Have a good breakfast Avoid people who you know will be freaking out. Read your texts if you want Read through your PowerPoint Print off all the stuff you need to the night before Remind your parents to make sure you get up by a certain time Put your PowerPoint on a USB, and email it to yourself and maybe another person as well. Stay chilled After you have done it, don’t freak out others who haven’t If you do badly it isn’t the end of the world Remain confident and make sure you don’t speak too fast or too slow Have fun!
An incentive that is always a possibility for motivation purposes is to have a bet against a friend over the results. It adds some rivalry for people who perform better with that.
KISS- Keep It Simple Stupid
If you do well, be happy! Have a drink of water prior to it to alleviate nerves and get rid of a dry throat DO NOT SWEAR!! It kind of brings down your marks
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So Finally Good luck with your IOP and hopefully you get what you deserve. This is all from my experience so if you would like to add anything send IB Screwed an email at:
[email protected]
Thanks
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