SilverZone Foundation · English · Class 8
International Olympiad of English Language (iOEL) Class 8: syllabus, dates and exam pattern (2026–27)
Everything you need in one place — the exact NCERT chapters this paper tests, all 3 exam dates, the registration window, and the full marking scheme. Updated for the 2026–27 session.
Last verified against SilverZone Foundation's own site on 13 September 2026. Exam dates re-checked on 13 September 2026.
2026–27 exam dates
Date 1
21 October 2026
Date 2
26 November 2026
Date 3
10 December 2026
SilverZone publishes these under the heading "Tentative Examination Schedule for the year 2026-27" — the body's own dates, but not marked final, so treat them as indicative until your school confirms. Two things on SilverZone's own pages do not line up, and both are worth asking your coordinator about. The schedule lists three dates while the iOEL page still says "the school may opt from the two dates suggested". And from 11 September 2026 SilverZone's exam-date data also lists an online iOEL sitting on 12 December 2026, which names no classes; online there describes how the paper is taken, not who registers, and entry is still through the school.
Registration: SilverZone publishes one registration cutoff covering every paper it runs, iOEL included: 30 September 2026, on the same schedule it heads "Tentative Examination Schedule." It is not one deadline per exam, and it falls three weeks before the first iOEL date of 21 October. SilverZone moved this date once already, from 31 August 2026 to 30 September 2026 on 2 September, with no announcement anywhere on its site, so re-check it with your school rather than relying on any copy of it, ours included. Registration is through participating schools only, so the date binds your school rather than you: ask your coordinator whether the school is entering iOEL this year, or write to info@silverzone.org.
The deadline is set by your school, not by you
Most parents find the exam date and assume they have until then. The registration window closes long before it, and for some papers it has already started closing. Here is how it actually works.
- Your school registers your child and your school picks which of the 2–3 dates the class sits. The family does not choose.
- For SOF papers, registrations must reach SOF exactly 30 days before that chosen date — and once the school has chosen, the date cannot be changed.
- Most bodies register through the school. Four do not have to: CREST (online, no published cutoff), Unified Council — directly for NSTSE itself at ₹350 against ₹150 through a school, and on three online sittings, NSTSE-Online, UIMO-Online and UIEO-Online, at ₹354 each including GST — Indian Talent Olympiad on its individual online route (its own later dates — Slot 1 closes 30 October), and Humming Bird (online, ₹150 a subject, no published cutoff — its two dates are picked as you register). CREST is the simplest of the four.
Closing next
Indian Talent Olympiad — Set A
Registration closes 10 September 2026 · all five subjects
SOF IMO (Maths)
If your school picks 23 October 2026, registration closes 23 September 2026 · Maths
SOF IEO (English)
If your school picks 27 October 2026, registration closes 27 September 2026 · English
SilverZone — every paper
Registration closes 30 September 2026 · all five subjects
The body publishes this date but has not marked it final — confirm with your school before treating it as fixed.
Or read the full calendar on the site — no sign-up
Every deadline in this box was checked against that exam body's own website on 5 September 2026. Bodies do move dates — we re-check every Monday.
Exam pattern
How the iOEL paper is structured
| Section | Questions | Marks per question | Section total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Correct Application of Grammar | 12 | 2.5 | 30 |
| Vocabulary Knowledge | 8 | 2.5 | 20 |
| Reading and Comprehension Skill | 3 | 2.5 | 7.5 |
| Writing and Speaking Ability | 7 | 2.5 | 17.5 |
| Brilliance Zone | 5 | 5 | 25 |
| Total | 35 questions | — | 100 marks · 40 minutes |
Class 8 iOEL is the Class 7 paper with one addition, and it is worth saying plainly rather than dressing up. SilverZone's Class 8 table has the same five sections at the same sizes — 12, 8, 3, 7 and 5 questions — the same marks, and the same named topics in every section but one: Vocabulary Knowledge adds homonyms, so seven word-level topics now share the same eight questions. A child who sat iOEL in Class 7 is sitting a paper of the same shape with slightly more ground behind the vocabulary section. The rest carries over from Class 7 unchanged. Grammar and vocabulary together are 50 of the 100 marks, against 7.5 for reading comprehension. The Brilliance Zone is five questions at 5 marks each, one seventh of the questions carrying a quarter of the paper. And 35 questions in 40 minutes is about 69 seconds a question. Class 8 is also the last year of that clock: SilverZone's own iOEL structure table gives Classes 6 to 8 thirty-five questions and forty minutes, and moves Classes 9 to 12 to forty questions and fifty minutes. One caution about the body's own pages: the iOEL overview prints two section lists labelled "(For Classes III-VI)" and "(For Classes VII-XII)", and its class-wise tables do not match them. Where they disagree, the class-wise table is the one to trust, and it is the one this page is built from.
SilverZone publishes no current-year/previous-year split for iOEL, so nothing is claimed here. The class-wise topic table is the whole of what the body publishes about what this paper contains.
Syllabus
English syllabus mapped to NCERT Poorvi (Class 8, 2026-27)
Ch 1. The Wit that Won Hearts
Olympiad syllabus label: Reading and Comprehension Skill — prose
Ch 2. A Concrete Example
Olympiad syllabus label: Reading and Comprehension Skill — prose
Ch 3. Wisdom Paves the Way
Olympiad syllabus label: Reading and Comprehension Skill — prose; Writing and Speaking Ability — paragraph writing
Ch 4. A Tale of Valour: Major Somnath Sharma and the Battle of Badgam
Olympiad syllabus label: Reading and Comprehension Skill — biographical account
Ch 5. Somebody's Mother
Olympiad syllabus label: Reading and Comprehension Skill — poetry
Ch 6. Verghese Kurien — I Too Had A Dream
Olympiad syllabus label: Reading and Comprehension Skill — autobiographical prose; Writing and Speaking Ability — paragraph writing
Ch 7. The Case of the Fifth Word
Olympiad syllabus label: Reading and Comprehension Skill — inference in a mystery story
Ch 8. The Magic Brush of Dreams
Olympiad syllabus label: Reading and Comprehension Skill — prose
Ch 9. Spectacular Wonders
Olympiad syllabus label: Reading and Comprehension Skill — descriptive prose; Vocabulary Knowledge — vocabulary in context
Ch 10. The Cherry Tree
Olympiad syllabus label: Reading and Comprehension Skill — narrative prose; Vocabulary Knowledge — vocabulary in context
Ch 11. Harvest Hymn
Olympiad syllabus label: Reading and Comprehension Skill — poetry
Ch 12. Waiting for the Rain
Olympiad syllabus label: Reading and Comprehension Skill — narrative and setting
Ch 13. Feathered Friend
Olympiad syllabus label: Reading and Comprehension Skill — science fiction; Vocabulary Knowledge — vocabulary in context
Ch 14. Magnifying Glass
Olympiad syllabus label: Reading and Comprehension Skill — informational prose; Vocabulary Knowledge — vocabulary in context
Ch 15. Bibha Chowdhuri: The Beam of Light that Lit the Path for Women in Indian Science
Olympiad syllabus label: Reading and Comprehension Skill — biography
As at Class 7, the book and the paper barely meet. Poorvi Class 8 is fifteen reading pieces, and what it feeds is the 7.5-mark comprehension section. The 50 marks of grammar and vocabulary come from outside the textbook, so a good English report card predicts very little about this paper. Now our own material, measured against SilverZone's Class 8 list, because a page that names the school book's gap and hides ours is not worth reading. Grammar is where we are strongest at Grade 8: of the eight grammar topics SilverZone names, our curator taxonomy has Grade 8 rows for parts of speech, articles and determiners, modals, subject-verb agreement and tense, and treats error finding as a question format built on those rows. Gerund and infinitive we do not cover at Grade 6, 7 or 8, and we say so. Vocabulary is the plainest gap: SilverZone names jumbled words, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, one-word substitution, spelling and idioms for 20 of the 100 marks, and not one of those seven has a Grade 8 row in our taxonomy. Our four Grade 8 vocabulary rows are word lists tied to four Poorvi chapters, which is real reading work and not word-relationship practice. The one topic SilverZone adds at Class 8, homonyms, sits in our Grade 6 material. In writing we carry paragraph and story writing, formal letters, reported speech, voice and sentence types at Grade 8, and have no Grade 8 row for notices, jumbled sentences, sequencing sentences, question tags, sentence improvement, choosing a filler or cloze. As at every class, the Brilliance Zone names no topics on any SilverZone table, so nothing about its content is published by anyone.
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