Annisa (CCHMS)

Individual task: in approximately 100 words write a reflection about how you/ your school currently teach the unseen

The unseen is taught in two components- poetry and prose, although the prose is typically favored for assessment purposes. The rationale is that unseen poetry adds a level of rigor to the teaching and learning process and that if students can understand what is implicitly expressed in a poem then a prose piece, with its more straightforward language, would potentially be easier to access. (Of course, this isn’t always the case!) Approaches to teaching include guiding students on how to identify literary devices and how the devices contribute to the overall tone and mood of an unseen piece. ICT tools are used as well. Most recently a youtube clip of an MCYS advertisement was used to help bridge the link between the issue of filial piety and an extract from ‘Tanjung Rhu’. Teachers also employ visual cues to help students create an image of an unseen text. A trainee brought in images of how orchid plants grow, creeping its way up the side of a fences for support, in order to give her class a clearer picture of how reliant a character in an extract was on her husband. Students are also at times given prose or poems that are thematically related to the texts that they are studying. (Eg: Things Fall Apart and poems by Maya Angelou)- this gives them some form of background knowledge which they can apply to the unseen piece.