The individual oral: from global issue to the 15 minutes

Format and Rules of the Individual Oral

The Individual Oral (IO) is your internal assessment (coursework done and marked at school), worth 30% at SL and 20% at HL (marked out of 40). Your teacher marks it, and the IB moderates it: a moderator listens to a sample of your school’s recordings and checks the marks. You get one attempt: once the oral has been held at the time your school sets, it cannot be redone.

Every candidate answers the same fixed prompt. In our own words, it asks you to examine how a global issue you choose is presented, through both content and form, in one literary work and one non-literary body of work you have studied.

Mandatory Requirements

• Texts: You must select one literary work and one non-literary body of work studied in class. A body of work is one long non-literary text (such as a documentary) or a set of shorter non-literary texts of one text type by one author or creator (such as one cartoonist’s cartoons).
• No reuse: Neither your literary work nor your non-literary body of work can be used later in Paper 2 or (at HL) the HL essay.
• Literary vs non-literary: Make clear in your oral which text is literary and which is not. A text by an author on the Prescribed reading list (the IB’s list of authors) or by a recognized literary writer always counts as literary, so it cannot be your non-literary body of work. An oral on two literary texts, or on two non-literary ones, does not meet the task.
• Extracts: Choose one extract from each text, each of up to 40 lines (for an image or a film, where lines do not apply, a section small enough to discuss in depth). Each extract must be continuous: you cannot cut lines out of the middle using ellipses. An extract can be a whole short text, such as a poem or an advert, but never two texts. Give copies to your teacher, who must approve them, at least a week before the oral.
• Materials in the room: You may bring only clean, unmarked copies of the two extracts and the official outline form, which allows a maximum of 10 bullet points. The IB sets no word count, but each bullet must be short: the outline is a springboard, not a script to read out.
• Time split: 10 minutes of uninterrupted prepared speaking, followed by 5 minutes of discussion and questions with your teacher.

The 40-Mark Rubric: Aiming for the 9–10 Band

The IO is marked across four criteria, each worth 10 marks in two-mark bands (1–2, 3–4, 5–6, 7–8, 9–10). Markers apply a best-fit approach: for each criterion they choose the band that best matches the oral as a whole. Within a band, they give the higher mark (e.g., 8 rather than 7) when your oral shows that band’s qualities strongly and comes close to the band above; in the top band, 10 goes to an oral that shows its qualities fully. The top band does not demand a faultless oral.