It was an exhilerating experience to work with a great group of participants at an IB Language A: Language and Literature workshop in Hong Kong this last weekend. While it was meant to be a Category 1 workshop, in fact, many of the participants had either English A1 or A2 experience. This led to a rich fusion of ideas and ideals. It helped to clarify for me how the new course has an identity in its own right while also identifying elements that will not leave either A1 or A2 teachers deskilled but might require different ‘angles’ or ‘approaches’ than what has been used in the past.
One of the key things to understand is that the course investigates and interrogates ‘contexts’ in a very wide sense (author’s life and his/her socio-historical/economic/geographical context, the reader (and his/her knower position), the way/format in which the text was originally produced, relevant critical theories, important events in relation to the text (past or present), contexts created within the text, how language constructs or reflects context (without or within the work) and the contexts that led to the creation and innovations of genres/text types and the conventions within them.
