The five IB Spanish B themes, what each one is actually asking you to teach.

The International Baccalaureate Language B program runs on five prescribed themes. The handbook descriptions are bland. The themes themselves are not. Used well, they are a respectful framework for the heritage students who are increasingly your IB cohort.

The five themes

The current IB Language B guide (first assessment 2020) lists five prescribed themes that all Language B courses (Spanish included) must cover across two years. Standard Level (SL) and Higher Level (HL) draw from the same five.

The themes:

1. Identities (Identidades)

Lifestyles, health and wellbeing, beliefs and values, subcultures, language and identity. The theme that on the surface looks like an icebreaker unit and is in fact the deepest of the five. For heritage students, this is the theme that either lands or alienates depending entirely on how the teacher frames it.

2. Experiences (Experiencias)

Leisure activities, holidays and travel, life stories, rites of passage, customs and traditions, migration. The theme that does most of the historical-cultural work. The migration sub-topic is where the heritage and non-heritage students sit at very different tables. Plan accordingly.

3. Human ingenuity (Ingenio humano)

Entertainment, artistic expression, communication and media, technology, scientific innovation. The theme that bridges contemporary culture with the analytical writing the IB external assessments demand. The literature stream of the HL course often lives here.

4. Social organization (Organización social)

Social relationships, community, social engagement, education, the working world, law and order. The theme that most often gets reduced to vocabulary lists. Treated seriously, it is where civic participation and political identity show up in a way that is harder to fake than the other four.

5. Sharing the planet (Compartiendo el planeta)

The environment, human rights, peace and conflict, equality, globalization, ethics, urban and rural environment. The theme that risks abstraction if you are not careful, and that pays off if you anchor it to a specific Spanish-speaking context rather than treating it pan-Hispanically.

Through the development of receptive, productive and interactive skills, students should be able to communicate successfully in academic and social contexts and across a range of registers.

What the themes actually measure

The themes are not content. They are scaffolds for the target language work. The IB Language B assessment is agnostic about which sub-topics you cover within each theme. It measures whether the student can do four things in the target language.

Paper 1 (productive skills) asks the student to produce a written text in one of three text types under exam conditions. The candidate picks one of three tasks. Each task is anchored in one of the themes. The grading rubric weighs language, message, and conceptual understanding (the idea that the text type and register were appropriate).

Paper 2 (receptive skills) is two halves: listening and reading. Each half draws from multiple themes. The assessment is comprehension in the target language. The texts at HL are denser, longer, and pull more from journalistic and literary registers.

The individual oral is the one most teachers prepare for most carefully. At SL, the student responds to a visual stimulus connected to one of the themes. At HL, the student analyzes a short extract from one of the prescribed literary works, then discusses one of the themes.

The heritage question, theme by theme

IB Spanish B is, in many US schools, increasingly populated by heritage students whose home Spanish does not match the register the assessment expects. The themes are simultaneously the opportunity and the trap.

Identities is the theme where you can either honor heritage students' layered identities (Salvadoran-American, Cuban-American, Tejana, Caribbean) or flatten them into a generic Latinx category. If your unit only references “Hispanic culture” without specifying which country, region, or community, you have flattened. Plan a sub-topic for each cohort that lets heritage students bring their own family's framing.

Experiences and the migration sub-topic deserve their own warning. Heritage students may be the children or grandchildren of immigrants from countries the rest of the class has only read about. Asking them to share family stories without warning, in front of peers, can be extractive. Ask permission privately first. Offer the opt-out. Build the unit so non-heritage students do real research instead of relying on a heritage student's labor.

Social organization and the political-engagement sub-topics are where heritage students from politically contested backgrounds (Venezuelan-American, Cuban-American, Nicaraguan-American) may have strong family positions that the unit's pre-packaged left-of-center framing does not accommodate. Plan for that. Choose source material that represents the political range of the community you are teaching about, not just the position you find most sympathetic.

The literary works problem at HL

HL requires two literary works. The list is not prescribed; the teacher selects from any Spanish-language literature. That freedom is also a burden. The canon most US teachers default to (García Márquez, Allende, Neruda, Cisneros) is excellent and overrepresented.

The list gets stronger when you include at least one work that gives heritage students a contemporary mirror. Junot Díaz (Dominican-American, code-switches into English), Esmeralda Santiago (Puerto Rican, memoir), Selva Almada (contemporary Argentine, sparse prose), Yuri Herrera (contemporary Mexican, on borders), Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (queer Argentine, political). Pair the canonical with the contemporary. The student who recognizes their family in the contemporary text reads the canon differently.

How to plan a two-year cycle

The most common mistake is to assign one theme per term and rotate. The themes do not work like that. They overlap. A unit on a particular Spanish-language film can sit inside Human Ingenuity (the artistic expression sub-topic) and simultaneously inside Identities (if the film deals with cultural identity) and Experiences (if the narrative is migration).

A better plan is to identify four to six rich anchor units per year, each genuinely interdisciplinary across two or three themes, with assessment tasks that draw on the primary theme. The student exits the two-year cycle having encountered every theme multiple times in different contexts. That is closer to how the external assessments actually test.

What this means for your Monday

Take your current IB Spanish B scope and sequence. Mark which theme each unit primarily addresses. Mark the secondary and tertiary themes each unit touches. If any theme is touched fewer than three times across the two years, you have a hole. If any theme is touched only with canonical pan-Hispanic material, you have a different hole.

Plug the first hole with content. Plug the second hole with specificity. Pick a country, a community, a contemporary author, a documented social movement. The themes are the scaffolding. The Spanish-speaking world is what you build on it.