Educerie · IB Diploma · English A: Literature

Paper 1 — Guided literary analysis

Paper 1 style, standard level · 20 marks · 75 minutes

Write a guided analysis of the following text. Your analysis must address the guiding question.

Guiding question: How does the writer use voice and structure to present the speaker's attitude to the past?

### The Long Field (original text, written for Educerie)

They have put a road through it now, the field where we were told not to go, and I have driven that road perhaps four hundred times without once thinking of the field.

It was only ever a field. Wet at the bottom end, a wire fence we went under rather than over, and in the middle, for one summer, a horse that no one claimed.

We were not brave there. We were nine. We went because we had been told not to, which at nine is the same as a reason, and we came back, and were not missed, and none of it was ever mentioned again.

I am telling you this because I drove it yesterday and stopped — not for any reason, not because I remembered anything, and sat with the engine running at the place where the fence had been, which I could not have found and found immediately.

Write a guided analysis of the text above. [20]

Total: 20 marks

How this is assessed. Four criteria, five marks each: A understanding and interpretation, B analysis and evaluation, C focus and organisation, D language. Criterion B — the analysis of how the writer's choices create effects — is where most marks are gained and lost. An analysis that walks through the poem stanza by stanza will cap criterion C.

Educerie · original assessment written against the published IB syllabus structure for Language A: Literature, amended guide, first assessment 2026. The poem "The Long Field" is an original work written by Educerie for this material. Last reviewed 5 September 2026.