IB DP English A Language and Literature Tutor in Ajman

Before anybody is paid, write down the four components and their weightings, because families routinely spend on the wrong one. Standard Level has three assessments: the guided analysis paper at 35 per cent, the comparative essay at 35, and the Individual Oral at 30. Higher Level has four: the guided analysis paper at 35, the comparative essay at 25, the Higher Level essay at 20, and the Individual Oral at 20. Check these against your school's copy of the guide, because a plan built on a superseded outline wastes paid time.

Now compare that with what gets practised in a typical school year. Literary works are read, discussed and essayed, so Paper 2 material accumulates naturally. The Individual Oral gets a flurry of attention in the weeks before the recording. The Higher Level essay gets a deadline. Unseen non-literary analysis, which is the largest single block of marks at both levels, is often practised a handful of times, usually against the same two or three text types.

That mismatch is the reason most group one grades sit below where the student's reading would suggest. It is also the cheapest thing on this page to fix, because unseen analysis responds to volume and honest marking rather than to more content. A student who writes one timed analysis a week for a term, marked against the criteria rather than praised, will move. The table below sets each component against where its marks go missing, so a family can aim their hours rather than spread them.

Standard Level students study two non-literary bodies of work and Higher Level students study three, and the unseen paper is drawn entirely from this half of the course. Yet when we ask a new student which text types they have analysed under time, the answer is usually an advertisement and an opinion column. That leaves speeches, photographs, infographics, political cartoons, travel writing, blogs and graphic novels as material they will meet for the first time in an examination.

Each type carries its own conventions and its own analytical vocabulary, and the examiner rewards naming them accurately. A photograph has framing, focal length, depth of field, gaze and caption relations. A political cartoon has caricature, labelling, symbol and juxtaposition. An infographic has visual hierarchy, data selection and the choices hidden in a scale. A student who writes 'the image is powerful' has said nothing a criterion can reward; one who explains how a low camera angle constructs authority has.

The fix is a rotation rather than a reading list. We work through the types a student has not met, one per session, each with a timed analysis and live marking, and keep a running glossary the student owns at the end. It is unglamorous and it is the most reliable mark movement available in this subject. For a family in Ajman budgeting a term, this is the block we would buy first and the one we would buy before the first mock rather than after it.

The guided analysis paper gives a student a non-literary text they have never read and a guiding question that tells them what to do with it. Standard Level candidates handle one text in an hour and a quarter; Higher Level candidates handle two in two and a quarter hours and must analyse both. Each analysis is marked out of twenty across the four criteria at five marks each, so one weak analysis at Higher Level cannot be rescued by a strong one.

Three failure modes account for most of the loss. The first is summarising: a candidate retells the text, perhaps elegantly, without ever explaining how it works on a reader. The second is ignoring the guiding question, which is treated as a theme to mention rather than as the spine of the answer. The third is running out of time at Higher Level, because a student spends seventy minutes on the text they liked and thirty on the other.

What a session fixes here is specific. We teach a reading procedure that takes twelve minutes and produces an annotated text with a thesis already visible; we teach how to convert a guiding question into three paragraph claims; and we practise splitting the Higher Level time evenly even when one text is more appealing. Then it is volume. One timed analysis a week with honest marking beats any amount of discussion about what analysis is, and an Ajman student who starts that routine in September has written thirty of them before the first mock.

The comparative essay asks one general question, chosen from four, answered by comparing two literary works studied during the course. The texts are not available in the examination room, which changes the preparation entirely: a student needs quotations in memory, a usable sense of each work's structure, and a stock of comparison points that can be bent to whichever of the four questions fits best.

Candidates lose marks in a pattern so consistent it is almost a signature. The first two paragraphs compare genuinely; the third describes one work; the fourth describes the other; the conclusion asserts that both works explore the theme. Criterion B rewards sustained analysis and evaluation, and an essay that stops comparing has stopped answering. The second common loss is a question answered in general terms about theme, with the works used as illustration rather than as evidence.

A session on Paper 2 is mostly structural. We build a comparison grid for the two works the school has actually taught, decide in advance which pairings serve which likely question types, and then practise writing paragraphs that hold both works in view at once. Memorised quotation banks are homework rather than paid time, and a parent can test them in ten minutes. For Ajman students whose school teaches an unusual pairing of works, this is where an independent reader matters most, because the grid has to be built for those two texts and nobody else's, and no published revision guide will have done it for them.

The Individual Oral is fifteen minutes: ten minutes of presentation and five minutes of questions from the teacher. The student chooses a global issue, then one literary extract and one non-literary extract of no more than forty lines each, and explores how each text presents that issue. It is forty marks across the same four criteria at ten marks each, and it is the component most sensitive to a single early decision.

That decision is the global issue. A student who chooses something enormous — inequality, identity, the environment — has set themselves an impossible ten minutes, because nothing specific can be shown in either extract. A student who chooses something narrow and real, such as how a particular kind of migrant worker is represented, or how grief is permitted to be expressed by men, can do close analysis in both extracts and still have time to connect them. We spend the first rehearsal session almost entirely on narrowing, and it is the highest-value hour in the block.

The rest of the rehearsal is mechanical and useful. Both extracts must be analysed, not mentioned; the structure must leave time for the second one; and the five minutes of questions reward a student who has thought about what a teacher might reasonably ask rather than one who has memorised a script. Our tutors do not write the oral and do not choose the extracts; they ask whether the issue can be shown in those lines, and they make the student answer.

Higher Level candidates write a formal essay of 1,200 to 1,500 words on one literary work or one non-literary body of work studied during the course, worth twenty marks across the four criteria at five each. The requirement that shapes everything is that the essay must develop from the learner portfolio. An essay invented from nothing in the final fortnight is possible to submit and very difficult to write well, because the thinking has not happened anywhere.

The line of inquiry is where the grade is set. A line of inquiry is a question narrow enough to be answered in 1,500 words with close reading of one text. Most first attempts are topics: 'the theme of power in the novel', 'the use of imagery'. Those produce essays that survey rather than argue, and criterion B caps them. A good inquiry is uncomfortable and specific, and arriving at one usually takes two sessions of being asked why the current version is not a question.

What a tutor may do here is tightly bounded and we hold the boundary. We question the inquiry, test whether the chosen text can sustain it, point out where an argument claims more than its evidence supports, explain what each criterion is asking for, and read one full draft leaving questions in the margin. We do not supply arguments, rewrite sentences, choose the text, or hand over a structure. Our tutors do not write a student's essay, and we say so because work produced by somebody else puts the student's whole Diploma at risk.

The four criteria use a small set of words to separate bands, and students who do not know what those words mean cannot aim at them. Criterion A moves from 'adequate' through 'good' to 'perceptive' understanding. Criterion B moves from 'descriptive' through 'adequate' to 'insightful and convincing' analysis and evaluation. Criterion C rewards organisation that is 'mostly' coherent, then 'coherent and effective'. Criterion D asks for language that is 'mostly clear' and then 'very clear, effective, carefully chosen and precise'.

Translated into practice, those words have concrete tests. 'Perceptive' means the interpretation notices something a careful reader might miss and supports it. 'Convincing' in criterion B means every claim about an authorial choice is followed by its effect on a reader, in the same sentence or the next. 'Coherent' in criterion C means a reader can state the argument of each paragraph from its first line. 'Precise' in criterion D means the terms are the right technical ones, used correctly, rather than approximate praise.

Teaching those four tests is the single most portable thing we do in this subject, because the criteria are reused across all four components. A student who learns to follow each feature with its effect has improved Paper 1, Paper 2, the oral and the Higher Level essay at once. That is why a term of honest criterion-based marking is worth more than a term of discussion, and why we mark in the document rather than talking about marking.

The learner portfolio is mandatory and unassessed, which is an awkward combination for a seventeen-year-old. It records a student's engagement with each text studied: notes, responses, trial paragraphs, questions that occurred to them. No mark is attached to it, no examiner reads it, and the Higher Level essay is required to develop from it. Students work out the first three facts quickly and discover the fourth in the second year.

A thin portfolio produces a predictable sequence. The essay deadline arrives, the student has no recorded thinking about any text, so they pick whichever work they remember best and invent a line of inquiry from the title. That inquiry has not been tested against the text, the essay surveys rather than argues, and criterion B does the rest. We can see a thin portfolio in the first ten minutes of a Higher Level essay session, and there is no cheap repair for it in March.

The intervention that works is early and almost free. One portfolio entry per text, written while the text is being taught, containing a question the student actually finds interesting and two pieces of evidence that bear on it. Twenty minutes per text, unpaid, supervised by a parent who asks to see it. For Ajman families who contact us during the first Diploma year, this is the recommendation we lead with, and it saves considerably more than it costs, because nothing we can sell in the second year substitutes for thinking that was never written down.

An honest list. One weekly hour fixes unseen analysis technique, the structure of a comparative paragraph, the narrowing of a global issue, the framing of a line of inquiry, and a student's reading of criterion language. It does not fix a student who has not read the works, it does not generate a portfolio retrospectively, and it does not substitute for memorised quotation. Where a family asks us to make up two years of unread novels in eight weeks, we say plainly that we cannot.

On price, the published UAE market runs from AED 45–65 an hour at EdFlik's entry tier and AED 33–52 at Tutopiya's, through AED 150–300 for a qualified subject teacher online with Unitors listing IB subjects from AED 200, to AED 200–450 and above for an IB specialist, with TutorChase at AED 270 and BartyED at AED 650. Visiting tutors are published at AED 180–500 an hour with travel included. Those are their figures, read in October 2026; IB Gram publishes no hourly list of its own.

Delivery is online, one-to-one, over live video. IB Gram does not offer home visits anywhere in the UAE — visiting tuition is a service we run only in India. For this subject the format is a genuine advantage: a timed analysis is written and marked inside the same document, an oral rehearsal can be recorded and played back, and the comparison grid for the school's own two works is built on a shared screen and kept by the student. One further point worth naming: an individual providing private lessons in the UAE needs the MoHRE private tuition work permit introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023, issued free of charge for two years, and it is a fair question to ask anybody before you pay them.