Assessment of Literature in St. Patrick's School

The assessment of Literature in St. Patrick's School is a combination of both formative and summative modes. As mentioned, the Secondary 1 students have external drama vendors coming in to teach them about stage play and techniques. The boys are required to put up a play of one of the plays in the textbook for this coming week. They are required to either improvise or follow exactly on the play. So far, they have already gone through several informal assessments of their plays in class. The official assessment will be part of their CA2 marks. They also had a formative assessment where they had to make use of their knowledge of PEE/OEE in their essay writing for the examination questions on the same play. As for the secondary 2 students, the formative assessment will be based on the students' creation of books of poetry and poetry slams. The summative assessment was on unseen poetry where they also had to use the PEE/OEE method to write a piece of practical criticism. The secondary 3 students do not have much time to go through the formative assessments because most of them take Literature as combined humanities. As, the only assessment for them is summative assessment (term test). I feel that Literature in SPS can be further improved - by bringing them out for field trips and assess them on their observation skills outside the classroom to expand their potential and capacities.

Literature in St. Patrick's School

I am currently given Secondary 1-3 Express Literature at St. Patrick's School. In total, I have 6 classes of Literature to focus on during my Teaching Practice. 

In St. Patrick's School, the secondary 1 students were exposed to drama in the 1st term. The school brought in external drama vendors to teach the boys about stage play and techniques to make a play more interesting. The drama vendors did something very similar to our drama workshop - we made use of a certain object to portray other uses of it. For example, using a piece of cardboard as a handphone. It was generally very appealing to the boys because they got to express their ideas outside of the classroom. For the secondary 2 students, they were engaged in poetry. Their teachers have taught them the O-E-E or P-E-E method (point/observation-evidence-explanation/elaboration) to write a practical criticism piece. For the secondary 3, they also did poetry criticism in term 1, and they would be moving on to reading Telltale:11 Stories in term 2. 

Generally, St. Patrick's School does not have enough Literature teachers to cope with the cohort. They even used the AED educators to teach Literature to the lower secondary students. I'm hoping for a positive change to the area of interest because the boys are generally not interested in the field of Literature.


** I forgot to mention that there is a sizable amount of boys I need to "take care":
secondary 3: 82 boys
secondary 2: 80 boys
secondary 1: 40 boys

for English, it's another class of 39 boys.

can you imagine the number of boys i need to remember?

QCR523 1st Post: Literature taught at SCGS.

SCGS offers the Language Arts programme to the lower secondary students and Full Literature / Elective Literature to the upper secondary students (Literature is compulsory at my school, so everyone takes Literature). I was assigned to join the lower secondary Language Arts team in my school's ELL department (for CS1: Literature) and I am currently teaching Secondary 1 LA. I have observed that LA is taught in a highly integrated manner. My department has developed a syllabus for the Sec 1s, split into 4 'modules'--1 for each term of the academic year--to designate a specific skill(s) and topical focus for each term. Term 1 (module 1) tries to bridge the gap between primary education and secondary syllabus with a module that goes easy on the students.

"Module 1: Moving Up; from Child to Teen" gets students to identify text types for different purposes, recognise formal register and tone, and practice different writing techniques to telling a story based on a collection of short excerpts. The lessons will guide students in descriptive writing tasks like narrative writing and a graded personal recount essay. Practices during lessons include informal comprehension tests that assessed students' ability to comprehend the writers' writing techniques and the intended effect/impact (this is a more Lit-based approach to setting comprehension exercises).

"Module 2: Hello, World! Subthemes: Nature, Culture & Family)" contained a selection of poetry and excerpts from novels/short stories. The aim is to get students to identify themes, develop personal response(s) to texts, explain/express what makes the texts interesting or effective in delivering their messages/central ideas. There is a comprehension test and a full-length narrative essay (Commonwealth essay) in the assessment component of this module. Classroom work involved the students in practicing the P.E.E paragraph format for writing a literary response to a text.

Because the term is affected by tournaments and the interruption of curriculum by the Outdoor Education Week (27 Feb - 2 Mar), the next part of the module, which focuses on character analysis, narrative skills (story plotting and narrative techniques), and evaluation of narrative technique, will continue after the March holidays. The assessment component includes a structured poetry test and a poetry writing portfolio to pick up from the previous focus on poem analysis. The lessons itself would prepare the students for full-fledged novel analysis in the remaining half of Term 2 and for a more 'practical criticism' reading of a literary text in Terms 3 and 4, where they will read Kira-Kira and Emily of Emerald Hill respectively.

On the whole, just by looking at the Scheme of Work for the entire year, I think the department tries hard to develop a rigorous syllabus that packs a lot of (Literature) foundation skills in a year's lessons in a progressive manner (spiral progression). Using the Understanding by Design (UbD) model, the department plans the Scheme of Work with specific goals (graded assignments/assessment and ungraded practice) in mind. It allows for a greater overlapping of EL skills and Literature skills in the teachers' development of the material (module packages 1-4). Appreciating literary techniques and devices also enhances students' writing abilities as they are taught to be consciously aware of these techniques in the text types they read for LA. I like how EL and Literature are mutually supportive in this LA programme. I am also very pleased that teachers are allowed to develop their own materials to supplement the module packages in their own lessons to suit their teaching needs (dependent on class profile etc) and styles.