Text extract from: Hiroshi Nakaso. The financial crisis in Japan during the 1990s: how the Bank of Japan responded and the lessons learnt. https://www.bis.org/publ/bppdf/bispap06.htm. Page 1.
Before you read the “spoiler” bullet points below take a careful look at the text. Imagine it is a text you are using for your DP Language A Language and Literature assessments ( Paper 1, the individual oral, the HL essay,) and analyze it accordingly. This text would not be appropriate for Paper 2.
Paper 1: first take a careful look at criteria A and B . Then, consider how you would approach this particular text in light of the requirements of criteria A and B.
Individual oral: Start by looking at criteria A and B for the IO. There are some similarities between the criteria in the individual oral and those in Paper 1. However, the individual oral also requires students to make connections between extracts from a work and body of work. The individual oral must make connections with the global issue that the student has chosen. Consider how this text is linked to different global issues.
HL essay: The HL essay is an in-depth analysis of a non-literary body of work or a literary work the student has studied in class. Imagine this text is from a non-literary body of work and consider possible approaches you could take with the 1200-1500 word HL essay. This could include evaluating connections between this text and the seven central concepts in DP Language A Language and Literature.
Some elements of this text to consider:
(FYI a text like this is not likely to be chosen for Paper 1. Regardless, it is good practice to become familiar with a wide variety of texts so if you get a somewhat unusual text on your real Paper 1 you are better able to handle the situation.)
- The very limited audience for this text
- The basic outline of this text – three fairly long paragraphs that each provide somewhat different information
- The length / complexity of some parts of the extract (e.g. the sentence that starts with “Though essentially a domestic problem …”)
- The parts of the introduction that give some context (e.g. “Although outside the scope of this paper…”)
- The formal language used thought the text with one exception (” Most of the seven years I spent at the Financial System Division of the Bank of Japan…”)
- Financial terms in the text (e.g. “asset bubbles,” “macroeconomic developments ” that are not explained and what this reveals about the audience
- How the third paragraph of the introduction lays out the structure of the rest of the text