Paper 2: RECEPTIVE SKILLS  50%           1h45 SL / 2h HL           65 points

A LISTENING  

3 audio extracts 45 min SL/ 1h HL 25pts

B Reading

3 texts 1h SL/HL

Audio extracts and texts on the 5 themes:

  • Social Organisations
  • Human ingenuity
  • Experiences
  • Sharing the planet
  • Identities

Text types

  • Article, column
  • Blog
  • Brochure, leaflet, flyer, pamphlet, advertisement
  • Essay
  • Interview in any form
  • News report
  • Report
  • Review
  • Set of instructions, guidelines
  • Short story, novel, poem
  • Written correspondence

Text-handling exercises

Questions assess a range of receptive skills such as understanding of overall meaning, scanning texts for particular details, understanding structural features (for example, cross references), functioning in context,and identifying communicative purposes. At HL the student’s understanding and interpretation (but not analysis) of literature are assessed.

  • These are the types of questions that may appear in paper 2.
  • Choosing which of a number of sentences are true according to the text
  • Gap-filling exercises based on comprehension of the text
  • Identifying clear inference from concepts (for example, “The text says that 60% of people think x.
  • What does this mean with regards to the remaining 40%?”)
  • Identifying precise references of key phrases or structures (for example, “In line x, to whom does theword ‘they’ refer?”)
  • Identifying related ideas that are in different parts of the text
  • Identifying specific content items
  • Identifying whether an explanation or definition is true or false, and finding the evidence for this in the text
  • Identifying who says what in a text or a series of short texts
  • Justifying an interpretation by locating evidence or key phrases (for example, “Where does the authorsay xxx?”)Matching summary sentences with different paragraphs of the textMatching words or phrases from the text with definitionsMultiple-choice questionsShort-answer questions