Teaching the Unseen Prose

For our school, we try to build upon the literary skills and strategies of close analysis that students have been familiarized with in the lower secondary syllabus. For example, we still focus on characterization and how a character may be depicted through his appearance, actions and words. This allows us to spiral up the level of difficulty, while still providing scaffolding for students through emphasizing the core skills needed for literary analysis. Prose texts from both 'Mining for Meaning' as well as 'Mastering the Unseen' are used as part of teaching unseen prose. Other than that, we did touch upon the generic features of texts -- tragic, comic -- as well as the use of irony. In teaching the unseen texts, we place emphasis on how students have make judicial use of evidence to support their inferences and arguments. We thus get students to highlight particular parts of a text and to explain/justify why that text is tragic or ironic.