International English Olympiad (IEO) Class 8: syllabus, dates and exam pattern (2026–27)

SOF is unusually direct about the relationship between this paper and the school book: "The tests for each level, although take into consideration the syllabus for each school year, are not directly related to them." The Class 8 list bears that out. Section 1, Word and Structure Knowledge, names synonyms, antonyms, analogies and spellings, collocations, phrasal verbs, idioms or proverbs, homonyms and homophones, one-word substitution, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, articles, prepositions, prepositional phrases, participle phrases, conjunctions, determiners, jumbled words and punctuation, tenses, voices and narrations, question tags, and vocabulary themes covering leisure, household items and issues, social causes and outdoor locations and activities. Section 2 is retrieval from news reports, blurbs, dictionaries, instruction manuals and message formats, then broad and specific understanding of longer texts like editorials and essays — document types a Class 8 English book does not contain. Section 3 is situation-based language: requesting, giving information, expressing surprise, and pronunciation. Section 4 names no topics of its own. Now our own side, and this is the part worth reading if your child is preparing with us. The curator taxonomy sheet Grade8_English is in good shape on structure: its olympiad-scope bucket carries 26 rows, more than Grade 6's 24, and they cover tenses, active and passive voice, direct and indirect speech, phrases and clauses, sentence transformation, determiners, subject-verb concord, conditionals, question-level punctuation and capitalisation, every part of speech, unseen passages, formal letter, article, report, speech and story writing, and figures of speech. What it does not carry is the word-level half: searched across every field of that sheet, there is no row for synonyms, antonyms, analogies, spellings, collocations, idioms or proverbs, homonyms or homophones, or one-word substitution. Its four vocabulary rows are tied to particular Poorvi passages — the descriptive words in Spectacular Wonders, the growth words in The Cherry Tree — which is useful reading work and is not the same as practising word relationships in the abstract. And the trend runs the wrong way: Grade 6 carries four word-level rows, Grade 7 carries one, Grade 8 carries none, while SOF asks 30 of 50 questions from Section 1 in all three classes. So a Class 8 child preparing Section 1 with us gets the grammar half properly and should work synonyms, antonyms, idioms, spellings and one-word substitution from a word list alongside. That is a gap in our coverage, not in the paper, and it is logged for the curator team rather than left on this page.