Teaching and Assessing Unseen Prose_Divya

Frankly I thought using adverts as a starting point to teach The Unseen is a brilliant approach. I personally find that my students have a problem developing opinions and have an even harder time expressing their opinions. Some are handicapped by the lack of vocabulary and some even write awkward sentences so their opinions literally get "lost in translation". I ususally get them to watch video clips about thought provoking concepts such as euthanasia, the holocaust and such which would wrench an emotion or two out of them. They would need to be provided with exercises and activities that would merely require them to circle appropriate adjectives to describe character, feelings, moods etc. The next step was looking for evidence for their choice of adjective and so on. I felt that this step had to be done before they moved on to tackle poetry and prose proper. Poetry is handled by (1) close analysis by way of a thorough study of the diction, language , form, rhythm etc (2) Responding by way of expressing the kind of mood & feeling the poem evokes etc. Prose always seems a littel easier because the structure is pretty standard - When i teach close reading, the focus would be on character study, tone of text - author's intention, Literary devices etc. & of course practising these skills on past year exam papers ; / Divya Raman