A step-by-step practice frame for the IB Language A: Language and Literature Paper 1. Read an unseen non-literary text — an advertisement, opinion column, infographic, leaflet, speech or web page — answer its guiding question with a clear analytical thesis, and build an analysis of the text's language and visual features and their effect on the audience — with the four assessment criteria and the closed-book exam method built in.
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This is roughly how your exported DOCX / PDF will read. Use it to rehearse a focused, well-organised guided analysis that answers the guiding question.
The IB Language A: Language and Literature Paper 1 is a closed-book external exam: you are given previously unseen non-literary texts — for example an advertisement, opinion column, infographic, public information leaflet, speech transcript, web page or cartoon — each with a guiding question, and you write a guided textual analysis (SL analyses one text in 1 hour 15 minutes; HL analyses both in 2 hours 15 minutes). This examiner-written practice frame walks you through the method step by step — read the text closely and identify its type, purpose and audience and pin down the guiding question, choose the textual, visual and rhetorical choices most worth analysing, state a clear analytical thesis that answers the question, and build a sequence of analytical points that examine the text's language and its visual and structural choices — mode of address, register and tone, rhetorical technique, layout, typography and image — and the effects they create on the reader. You support every point with precise reference to the text and close on a controlled, well-timed response. Each step is paired with the assessment criteria, worked good-and-bad examples and the traps that cost marks, and your practice response exports to DOCX or PDF. The planning sections are free to use; the later sections are a one-time unlock. Sign in to save your work and sync it across devices.
Paper 1 is marked across four criteria: A — Understanding and interpretation; B — Analysis and evaluation; C — Focus and organization; D — Language. Top-band responses answer the guiding question with a clear, arguable analytical thesis, analyse the writer's and designer's deliberate choices and their effects on the reader rather than describing the content, support every point with precise reference to the text, and write in fluent, precise language appropriate to textual analysis.
The whole analysis is built around the guiding question — usually a focused "How does…?" question about how the text's choices produce a particular effect on its audience. Treat the text as a deliberate construct built for a purpose and an audience: analyse how it is made, not what it says. For non-literary texts the toolkit is textual, visual and rhetorical — purpose and audience, register and tone, mode of address, structure and layout, typography and image, rhetorical and persuasive technique — and crucially their effect on the reader. Ground every argument in a precise reference, analyse the mechanism by which the choice creates its effect, and keep returning to the guiding question, purpose and audience.
The Language & Literature Paper 1 tool is free to start: the planning sections are free, and the later sections are a one-time unlock per tool. You sign in to save your work to your own account and sync it across devices. The frame and its guidance are written by experienced IB educators.