Teaching Unseen Prose

When I started teaching Upper Secondary Literature two years ago, I was unsure how best to approach the Unseen in an fun, engaging and meaningful manner. I wanted to move on to activities and learning tasks, besides just pen and paper exercise, to stimulate my students' thinking and learning. More importantly, I wanted to adequately prepare my students for formal assessments in the Unseen section of the Literature assessments especially the at the 'O' Level. With suggestions and hand-holding from my very experienced colleagues, I have managed to create learning tasks that my students apparently have enjoyed and done well so far. One of the approaches was to get students to select songs they like and do a literary analysis on each of them. When students presented their analysis, they had to orally defend their assertions when their peers questioned them in class. My colleagues also looked at music videos and got their students to do real-time online discussion with the teachers. A lot of the work we have been doing centers around group and class discussions on print and non-print materials. What has really helped for me as a new Literature teacher has been the generous sharing of resources as well as ideas in the department.