As my school is a Chinese-speaking SAP school, the majority of students have a weak foundation in English. The school also does not have a strong reading culture and many students do not explore reading materials beyond their assigned school texts. Thus, Literature teachers frequently find it an uphill task to engage un-motivated students who find it difficult to read, understand and interpret Unseen poems/prose. To kick-start the students’ inertia and allay their anxieties about reading and interpreting, we would typically start with scaffolding activities to activate the students’ schema and ease them into the text. These scaffolding activities include the use of anticipation guides (true/false questions about a particular theme in the poem that would help the teacher assess the students’ prior knowledge), or group discussion activities on audio or visual stimuli-pictures, posters, advertisements, songs, film clips, etc. These hook activities are sometimes also done to contextualize or situate the poem/passage so that it becomes less culturally or linguistically alien for the students.
Not only are these activities less intimidating and more manageable, students are also more confident to read/interpret the poem/prose subsequently when they see their responses to previous activities validated by the teacher during class discussion. Once the students have read the Unseen once or twice individually, it would then be broken down into manageable, bite-sized portions for close-reading and group discussion (with guiding questions from the teacher).
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