Reflection on teaching unseen prose

I teach Language Arts instead of Litearature in my school. Unseen prose constitutes only one part of the programme. There are not many opportunities to teach unseen prose and so far, two unseen prose lessons were taught by me. In one lesson, students were taught how to identify character traits based on a set text (To Kill A Mocking Bird); thereafter, they applied the same set of skills on an unseen text. The students were expected to articulate their interpretations and justify how they derived the interpretations. In another lesson, the students were required to analyse the setting of a short story to explain how it created a sense of fear in the story. I guided the students step-by-step in unpacking the various setting of the story to see how the sense of fear was created. In both lessons, the students were given opportunities to share their work and this had allowed the class to see things from different perspectives. In the second lesson, the students generally did not address the question directly - many found it difficult to explain how the setting created the sense of fear.