This study is an investigation into the challenges faced by Advanced Level Literature in English teachers in Zimbabwe in the teaching of the Comment and Appreciation paper. The study takes a qualitative approach to unearth the attitudes of teachers and to unravel the implications from documents studied. Content analysis, interview and observation techniques were used to gather data. The study established that instead of teaching skills for explication of the ‘unseen’ texts, the general approaches used incline more towards ‘testing’. Equally, the study revealed that most teachers are not confident to teach the paper, with the majority resorting to drills of particular genres, instead of taking a holistic approach encompassing all the three genres [poetry, drama and prose], including the recreative-response type question. The study, therefore, holds that the misconception about the difficulties of this component of the syllabus is rather unfounded. As a recommendation, the study implores institutions of higher learning to ensure that prospective or would-be-teachers of Literature in English are well grounded in the skills of explicating ‘unseens’. In the wake of the updated secondary school curriculum under the auspices of the Zimbabwe Education Blueprint (2015-2022), the Advanced Level Literature in English learning still has the Comment and Appreciation component as a compulsory, hence the need for teachers [and learners alike] to have an indepth appreciation of how to unpack meaning from a given ‘unseen’ text.

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