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Teaching Shakespeare to ESL Students - The Study of Language Arts in Four Major Plays

Teaching Shakespeare to ESL Students - The Study of Language Arts in Four Major Plays
  • Miriam Lau BA 2005; MPhil 2010

  • Anna Tso BA 2001; MA 2002; MA 2004; PGDE 2009

  • Springer


This is a teacher’s resource book tailor-made for EFL teachers who want to bring Shakespeare into their classes. It includes forty innovative lesson plans with ready-to-use worksheets, hands-on games and student-oriented activities that help EFL learners achieve higher levels of English proficiency and cultural sensitivity. By introducing the plots, characters, and language arts employed in Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice, the book conveys English grammatical rules and aspects like a walk in the garden; complicated rhetorical features such as stress, meter, rhyme, homonymy, irony, simile, metaphor, euphemism, parallelism, unusual word order, etc. are taught through meaning-driven games and exercises. Besides developing EFL learners’ English language skills, it also includes practical extended tasks that enhance higher-order thinking skills, encouraging reflection on the central themes in Shakespeare’s plays.