I've been teaching Lower Secondary Literature for three years and I love teaching the Unseen component because it is the most fun! I can choose whichever prose extract or poem I want and at times, customise the entire unit (for the whole stream) to my liking! For example, because I LOVE war poetry, all the Sec 2 students in both Express & Normal Academic are exposed to War Poetry as part of their preparation for the Unseen Poetry component in their exams. *grin* Now that I also teach Upper Secondary Literature, I try not to take away the fun from the Unseen, whenever the opportunity presents itself. And so far, I've been able to do that, perhaps, 90% of the time, since we get to select what we bring into the classroom, in the first place!
I like teaching the Unseen through experential learning. I enjoy getting students to engage with the five senses, where possible. I provide some scaffolding through visuals (my favourite are music videos or pictures) or get my students to perform poetry or the actions in the prose I'm about to introduce them to, just to give you some examples.
Because the students in my Upper Secondary Literature class are rather weak in the English Language and have developed a 'phobia of sorts' to expressing their thoughts confidently, I usually break my lessons up into small portions, always providing (and at times, forcing) some opinion or other, out of my students. I notice that this strategy is slowly, but surely, bearing fruit as they are writing better, and more meaningfully engaging essays.
I guess the most important lessons I have learnt on the teaching of the Unseen in the course of the past year is to pick material that I too enjoy or am intrigued to analyse, to challenge myself to find new and creative ways to introduce and think about the selected material (so that every lesson is different from the last) and to place priority in exposing my 'sheltered' students to a wide variety of material - in terms of theme and style, especially.
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