IB Diploma Programme Language A: Literature – Course Concepts and Critical Perspectives Practice Questions

These are original questions written for Marlbridge, for revision and practice on this content. They are not reproduced past-paper questions, and they do not replicate the exam’s exact structure, question count or mark tariffs – the IB holds copyright in its own papers. Use these alongside the official past papers available through your school or the IB store.

This practice set covers Course concepts and critical perspectives for IB Diploma Programme Language A: Literature, at SL and HL. It follows the current IB subject brief (first assessments for SL and HL 2021). The unit maps to two areas of exploration, Readers, writers and texts and Intertextuality: connecting texts; there are no numbered subtopics.

Learn the unit first with the study guide and the revision notes. Course links: Language A: Literature hub · printable checklist.

Questions

1. Explain the difference between a critical perspective and a personal opinion. [2]

2. The subject brief says students “negotiate meanings for texts”. Explain what this asks you to do when two interpretations of a text conflict. [2]

Passage A – public-domain poem

Christina Rossetti, “In an Artist’s Studio” (written 1856, first published 1896).

One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
A saint, an angel – every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

3. Identify two ways Passage A presents the woman as someone looked at rather than someone who acts. Support each with a quotation. [2]

4. Read Passage A through a feminist (gender) lens. Explain two points, each with evidence. [4]

5. Explain how the concept of creativity works in Passage A, for both the painter and the poet. [4]

Passage B – prose (original text written for Marlbridge; people, places and the company are invented)

Plot 14

Nan’s allotment sat in the shadow of the old rolling mill: plot 14 of 40. The mill shut the year my mother was born, and the council let the land to anyone who would dig it. Nan dug it for thirty-one years. She grew what the shop charged too much for: runner beans, onions, rhubarb for half the street. The men from the mill kept the plots by the gate. Nan’s was at the far end, by the fence, where the soil was full of cinders and she barrowed in manure from Oates’s farm.

Last spring a letter came. The site had been sold to Brindlemoor Homes as “a regeneration opportunity”. Plot-holders would be offered “alternative provision”.

On her last Sunday Nan did not dig. She sat on an upturned bucket and ate a raw pea-pod, slowly, the way you eat something you have paid for. Behind her the new hoarding said FUTURE LIVING. Beside her a blackbird worked the turned earth as if nothing had been sold at all.

6. Read Passage B through a class (Marxist) lens. Explain two points, each with evidence. [4]

7. Make one ecocritical point about Passage B, with evidence, and name one detail that lens cannot explain. [3]

Passage C – two student interpretations of Passage A (original texts written for Marlbridge)

Interpretation 1. “This is a love poem. The painter is loyal to one woman: he paints her ‘by day and night’, and she looks back ‘with true kind eyes’. Rossetti admires his devotion.”

Interpretation 2. “The poem is only about Christina Rossetti’s brother, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the woman he painted. It is a record of her family and tells us nothing beyond that.”

8. Evaluate Interpretation 1, using at least two tests (evidence, coverage, coherence, context, counter-reading). [4]

9. Evaluate Interpretation 2, and suggest how its writer could improve it. [4]

10. Guided analysis plan: How does the writer of Passage B present the allotment as a place that means different things to different people? Give a thesis, three analytical points with evidence, and one counter-reading you would address. [8]

11. Comparison plan: Compare how Passage A and Passage B show one viewer’s perspective shaping how another person or place is seen. Give a thesis, three points of comparison with evidence from both passages, and a sentence on what the comparison reveals. [10]

Answers

1. A critical perspective is a consistent set of questions a reader brings to a text; a gender lens asks who is looked at and who decides. [1] A personal opinion is an untested reaction; a perspective produces an interpretation that can be checked against the text. [1] Examiner insight: “A perspective is a point of view” earns nothing; the credit is for the difference, which is testability.

2. Test each reading against the text, for evidence and coverage, instead of choosing a favourite. [1] Reach a reasoned position that keeps what each reading explains well, drops what fails, and says why. [1] Examiner insight: Strong answers describe a process; “pick the best one” gives no criterion.

3. Any two, each with a quotation: she is reduced to a repeated image, “One face” or “One selfsame figure” [1]; she is hidden or only reflected, “hidden just behind those screens”, or consumed by his gaze, “He feeds upon her face” [1]. Examiner insight: Two quotations for the same way earn one mark.

4. The painter turns one woman into roles he chooses: “A queen”, “A nameless girl”, “A saint, an angel”. “Nameless” erases her. [1] Every canvas “means / The same one meaning”, so her variety is flattened into his single idea of her. [1] “He feeds upon her face by day and night” makes looking a kind of consuming: he takes, she is used. [1] The last line, “Not as she is, but as she fills his dream”, shows her present self replaced by his fantasy. [1] Examiner insight: The lens must lead to analysis of words (“feeds”, “fills”), not a summary.

5. The painter’s creativity is repetitive and possessive: “every canvas means / The same one meaning, neither more nor less”. [1] His art fixes her in an idealised past: “Fair as the moon and joyful as the light”. [1] The poet’s creativity corrects his: the repeated “Not as she is” in the last two lines reveals what the paintings leave out. [1] So the poem is art that criticises a way of making art, and asks the reader to see the woman the canvases hide. [1] Examiner insight: Treating creativity as the painter’s skill only misses half the question.

6. Institutions control the land: “the council let the land”, then it was “sold to Brindlemoor Homes”. [1] Nan works it for “thirty-one years” but never owns it, so her labour gives her no legal claim. [1] The developer’s euphemisms, “a regeneration opportunity” and “alternative provision”, sit in quotation marks that show the narrator’s distrust. [1] “FUTURE LIVING” sells a future to buyers, not to those who kept the land alive. [1] Examiner insight: Credit comes from details of ownership and language; “Nan is poor” is assertion.

7. The blackbird “worked the turned earth as if nothing had been sold at all”: nature does not recognise human ownership. [1] Soil “full of cinders”, made fertile by manure, shows land renewed after industry. [1] The lens cannot fully explain “the way you eat something you have paid for”, which is about money and human feeling. [1] Examiner insight: Naming what a lens leaves out is evaluation, and earns its own mark.

8. Evidence: the quotations are accurate and show constancy. [1] But “feeds upon” is a consuming verb, not a devoted one, so the evidence is partly misread. [1] Coverage: it ignores “Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright”, which says the paintings show her past, not her present. [1] He is loyal to an image, not the woman. [1] Examiner insight: “I disagree, it is not a love poem” is a counter-opinion, not an evaluation.

9. Biography can be a valid lens if it is supported and used alongside the text. [1] But the poem names no one: the painter is only “he”, and the woman is “A nameless girl”. [1] “Only” and “nothing beyond that” shut out the general pattern the poem builds, “all his canvases” and its list of types, which could apply to anyone who idealises another person. [1] Improvement: keep the biography as one tentative lens beside a wider, text-based reading. [1] Examiner insight: Context earns credit when tied to specific lines, not when it replaces them.

10. Model plan (indicative points): Thesis: to the council and developer the plot is property; to Nan it is labour and food; the ending lets nature claim it too, asking who has a right to a place. [1] Point 1: “plot 14 of 40”, “the council let the land” [1]; the official view reduces the place to a number and a transaction. [1] Point 2: “Nan dug it for thirty-one years”, “she barrowed in manure” [1]; her claim is made by work, turning cinders into soil. [1] Point 3: “Behind her the new hoarding”; “Beside her a blackbird” [1]; the parallel sentences place Nan between the developer’s future and nature’s indifference. [1] Counter-reading: the blackbird may seem consoling, but “as if” suggests illusion, so the ending stays uneasy. [1] The real exam is marked holistically against the IB criteria, not point by point. Examiner insight: Each point must say whose meaning it shows, or the plan loses the question’s focus.

11. Model plan (indicative points): Thesis: in both passages a viewer with power fixes another person or place in a single meaning, and the text restores what that view leaves out. [1] Comparison 1: A’s “every canvas means / The same one meaning” and B’s “a regeneration opportunity” both reduce something living to one idea [1]; the painter’s view is private desire, the developer’s is public commerce. [1] Comparison 2: A’s paintings hide her present sorrow, “Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim”; B’s “alternative provision” hides the labour in soil “full of cinders” [1]; each shows a cost the powerful view ignores. [1] Comparison 3: A corrects the view directly with the repeated “Not as she is” [1]; B corrects it through a grandchild narrator (“my mother”) and a quiet closing image [1]; the poem negates, the prose shows. [1] Lens link: gender suits A, class suits B; both ask who decides how something is seen. [1] Reveals: literature gives back the meaning that ownership and desire take away. [1] The real exam is marked holistically against the IB criteria, not point by point. Examiner insight: Weave both passages into each point; all of A, then all of B, is two analyses.

Where marks are usually lost

• Naming a lens and then retelling what happens, with no analysis of a word or image.
• Treating another reader’s interpretation as fact instead of testing it.
• Evaluating by disagreement (“I think it is not a love poem”) instead of applying criteria.
• Using biography or history in place of the text rather than alongside it.
• Comparison plans that give each passage its own block.
• A thesis that states a topic (“both are about power”) instead of an arguable claim.

Next steps

• Revision notes for this unit
• Study guide for this unit
• Intertextuality practice
• Language A: Literature hub
• Printable checklist
• All free 10-minute diagnostics
• Book a free trial class

Official syllabus

International Baccalaureate Organization, Diploma Programme Subject Brief, Language A: literature, first assessments for SL and HL 2021 (2019). Passage A is a public-domain poem by Christina Rossetti; Passages B and C are original texts written for Marlbridge.