To teach or not to teach Shakespeare: an example-based approach for the foreign language classroom

Ongoing open access book project

My love is thine to teach. Teach it but how,
And thou shalt see how apt it is to learn
Any hard lesson that may do thee good.

(Much Ado About Nothing, 1.1. 285-287)

This is an ongoing open access book project with a particular focus on bringing William Shakespeare and his plays to teenage students in the English as Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. The aim is to provide 21st century teenagers with an accessible entry point to Shakespeare, recognizing that without active engagement with his works in their schooling curriculum, they may never have the opportunity to encounter and appreciate them later in life.

To teach or not to teach Shakespeare: an example-based approach for the foreign language classroom aims to be the textbook & teaching guide to help time-pressed teachers overcome the challenges of bringing Shakespeare into EFL classrooms. It also wants to serve as (a self-study) introductory textbook to respective plays for future language teachers at university or doing their teacher training. The textbook & teaching guide format of the book aims to provide its readers with the methodological background not only on teaching Shakespeare, but also on teaching literature and how this can be done actively fostering all the core language learning competences and in particular text and media literacy and literary-aesthetic competence as well reading competence, be it critical, slow, deep, intense, multimodal or extensive. At the same time, all chapters will embed material and worksheets in the format of Open Education Resources (OER), thereby offering language teachers a ready-to-use and easy-to-adapt toolkit of material, worksheets and learning scenarios.

By providing the literary context, teaching methodology, and practical classroom tools in a open-access online format, To teach or not to teach Shakespeare is written in the hope to reduce the difficulties many educators may face in finding a suitable entrance point to Shakespeare’s plays for themselves that at the same time shows them concrete pathways to bring and experiment with how to teach Shakespeare for their particular target group of teenage language learners.

The book chapters do this as an example-based approach by covering specific plays in such a way that foreign language teachers have ready input to be able to teach this play in their classroom in a range of different learning scenarios: be it a short mini-unit maybe spanning one or a few lessons and by making use of suitable adaptations or be it the entire play (in an adaption and/or the original text). Particular attention will be paid to scaffolding and motivating ways to reduce the language barrier. The underlying aim is to empower foreign language students – regardless of their individual language proficiency level – to actively experience Shakespeare as a truly global writer who “was not of an age, but for all time” (Ben Jonson, Preface to the First Folio, 1623).

In the set-up of this example-based approach on specific plays, the book differentiates between three teaching approaches for suitable teaching scenarios and learning designs:

(1) compact or focused approaches: working with selected passages, scenes, or themes within limited time frames

(2) comprehensive approaches that allow teachers to cover entire plays with their students 

(3) adaptive approaches when for example the manga adaptation of a Shakespeare play takes center stage in your classroom. 

Each play is introduced by giving an overview of its respective historical and literary context. This is followed by a discussion of possible editions, adaptations and multimedia resources with a particular focus of their respective merits for use in the foreign language teenage classroom. As in our digital 21^st century, more and more online and multimedia resources on Shakespeare are available (and in many cases for free!), many websites are introduced, often as suggestions on how they can serve as digital enhancement for learning scenarios and activities.

Why Shakespeare in the EFL/ESL classroom? Why now?

Shakespeare is the one writer worldwide that has been part of school curricula for several centuries and for good reason. In today’s competence-oriented educational landscape, there is a growing emphasis on developing 21st-century competencies and their measurable learning outcomes. This focus on competencies has led to reduced attention to longer literary texts in many curricula. In an on-going process over the last twenty years, more and more state curricula in Germany have dropped Shakespeare’s plays from their required reading lists for the higher secondary grades. 

This leaves teachers facing several difficult choices: which texts and reading projects to include in their classrooms in general, and whether to teach or not teach Shakespeare in particular. More often than not, the lack of suitable teaching material for engaging literary texts and reading projects poses an additional challenge for teachers who wish to include such content alongside the regular school curriculum based on the textbook. With Shakespeare teachers face an additional challenge: the scarcity of engaging, accessible materials for teaching Shakespeare to EFL learners of different language levels in the secondary classroom. This book aims to fill this gap by providing teachers with activities, learning scenarios and ready-to-adapt materials for their own classrooms.

The good news is that “to do” Shakespeare’s plays in the modern language classroom – whether in the original or in multimodal for different age groups and language levels – still offers tremendous educational value for today’s teenagers, not only those in upper secondary grades. With the right student-centered methodology, students can make use of the very competencies modern (foreign) language education emphasizes, while actively engaging with the playwright whose name and influence they already know from various contexts and whose global acclaim is unsurpassed by that of any other writer. 

Teaching Shakespeare to teenagers and language learners offers numerous benefits, despite the challenges Shakespeare pose for native and foreign English language students alike. There are compelling arguments why teachers should consider including Shakespeare in their lesson planning: not just once in the higher grades for advanced learners, but by starting off with small teaching units or by including adaptations in the lower secondary grades.

• Active teaching approaches to Shakespeare involve all core language learning competencies emphasized in 21^stcentury curricula, but can also foster in particular critical thinking and reading paired with the necessary cultural and language awareness; all of which are becoming more and more important assets to be fostered in children and teenagers growing up in the 21st century digital culture.
• The agelessness or universality of Shakespeare’s themes and psychological depictions of human nature – a unique cast of characters facing identity and power struggles as well as strong emotions from different kinds of love and passions to jealousy and hate – allows students from diverse backgrounds to connect with the texts on a personal level.
• By engaging with Shakespeare’s works, the language classroom can provide teenage students with an entry point to a deeper appreciation for literature and the English language in the 21st century.

While the language of Shakespeare’s plays can seem daunting at first, there are many strategies and resources available to make his works more accessible to EFL learners. By using scaffolding, engaging student-centered teaching methods, adaptations and multimedia resources, teachers can provide the right input, help students overcome the language barrier and discover the richness of Shakespeare’s works more and more on their own. In doing so, they not only expose students to an important author in our universal cultural world heritage, but also equip them with critical and deep reading experience, resilience and hopefully literary enjoyment that extend beyond the classroom.

How to read & work with this book

This digital publication is a living work, with chapters being released individually as they’re completed. Check back for updates as the book grows, with new content integrating into successive versions.

This digital book is subject to periodic updates. At the end of each chapter an info-box provides the date when the chapter was last uploaded and the weblinks accessed.

Each chapter of this book can be downloaded as a separate PDF. 

Furthermore, suitable multimedia enhancements, online resources and adaptations such as graphic novels, manga, easy-reader versions of the plays are discussed throughout the book, a particular focus being on their pedagogical suitability for EF learners.

All chapters of the book are written as separate units so that teachers get a comprehensive background on the chapter’s topic and a methodological discussion of its classroom integration and application. 

For reader-friendliness, key methodological ideas as well as multimedia recommendations are integrated into each chapter, and might therefore be included in more than one chapter when similar issues are discussed.

Navigating this book: a practical, multimodal interface for Shakespeare teachers