Teaching the Unseen

I have always based my teaching of the Unseen using the SLIMS and SPECs provided by my department. When I first started teachinf the Unseen to the upper secondary students two years ago, I relied heavily on Suzanne Choo's Mining for Meaning. To date I still use her book as a reference as well as Dr Andrew Leng's Mastering the Unseen. The students found Mining for Meaning easy to follow and useful. I have since added pictures and videos to my lessons. By adding 'weird' materials (students comment), they usually become more interested and are more responsive during the lessons. The challenge is to reel them back towards a more exam-oriented type of texts.

Instructions for rest of e-learning task

Dear all,

Just to remind you of the last two sections of your e-learning tasks.

With best wishes,

Angus


(ii) In groups of 3 (you can work with classmates from your own or other schools): Drawing upon the ideas and strategies that we have explored during the past three sessions, share a creative way to teach and assess an unseen passage not discussed in class (no more than 500 words) (deadline 19 April 2011).

(iii) Individual (optional): Please post three constructive responses and comments on classmates’ ideas (deadline 26 April 2011).

Teaching the Unseen in Upper Secondary

In teaching the Unseen Prose, I teach the various Literary Elements like, Setting, Mood & Atmosphere, Style, Tension & Suspense etc to the students. Many times, I try to infuse the teaching with visual texts (images or videos) to help students to better understand the various elements.
After I explicitly teach, there students will be given either individual tasks or group tasks where they need to apply what they have just learnt. This way, I get to see whether students have learnt - are they still unclear about certain elements (do they know how to identify them from the texts).

Students will usually discuss/present their answers in class - the other groups are often encouraged to ask questions and not take the answers as it is but to ask if what they say are valid.
This way, it forces the students to think deeper and not be superficial in their answers.

Teaching the Unseen (Anglican High School)

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).

Teaching Unseen Poetry

I started teaching my very first very first upper secondary Literature class this year, and it’s been an interesting experience so far. I started the year with unseen poetry, and I used many pictures and advertisements to get students to think about what it means to be able to think critically. We broke down into smaller bites the meanings (and hidden meanings) of different advertisements, and then students had to look for one advertisement of their own and do a critical analysis of it as an assignment.

For poetry, I used a number of songs to teach the different devices – “End of the World” and “Firework” were used to teach sound devices and imagery respectively. I tried my best to break it down so that students were able to understand how the devices worked at their most basic then link it to effect and poet’s intention. From the song/picture/sound, I would move on to lines/stanzas, then to full poems. Students were able to follow and have a better grasp of the concept this way. I really hope that through this course I would learn skills and strategies to enhance my students’ learning and to make Literature meaningful for them.

teaching the unseen

I am teaching a Sec 3 class this year. I've not really covered much of the unseen last term as we were more focussed on hitting the ground running with the set text. The few unseen lessons I had with my class were discussions-based. I would give hard copies of selected poems and get students to think and contribute points, bouncing off ideas from one another. It helps greatly that there are only 11 students in my class and most of them are responsive and enthusiastic about lit. I have used songs and videos related to the poem or theme of the poem to activate schema for students. With regard to content knowledge of literary devices and elements of poetry, i tend to do a bit of explicit teaching with examples before letting them apply the skills on their own.

Unseen in Peicai Secondary

I am quite fortunate (unfortunate?) to have only 4 combined Lit students and 1 Pure Lit student in my class. Having a small class means I can actually spend undivided attention on them and it also means that I have to prepare a lot for that 5 students. I can't really do groupwork as I always end up having one group only. Like Dr Whitehead, I used pictures and advertisements to teach them to think critically and bring up the point that things (words) exist for a reason. The assessment is that they have to use the literary devices, such as diction, alliteration to create a commerical on their own. Hence, students can apply the literary devices that they learnt. Next, I get the students to think of a theme, and they have to cut pictures that suit their themes. For example, the theme could be on growing up and the relevant pictures are paths, friends, angles, candles etc. One of the Themes can be on peace. Colour blue, dove can be used to signify peace. This year, I will also be asking students to craft their own Literature questions. A poem or prose is given to the students and they have to craft their questions. The questions can be on themes, characters, the techniques etc. They have to come out with the answer key too. students can be independent in their learning and have higher order thinking skills. After this exercise, Students will (hopefully) pay more attention to the requirement of the question and know what entails a satisfactory answer.