When people mention Shakespeare they instantly think of the United Kingdom and the English language. Shakespeare has contributed to the foundation of the Modern Early English and some of the insults and expressions we use nowadays are attributed to William Shakespeare’s brilliant mind and creative wordplay.
Lecturați gratuit Teaching Shakespeare to EFL Students, autor Drăgoi-Antoniuc Bogdan-Stejărel
Lucrarea poate fi citită online în Biblioteca Didactică (www.bibliotecadidactica.ro). ISBN 978-606-30-7103-4
One of the biggest challenges that a professor of English has to face is to teach Shakespeare to students that study English as a foreign language. The English playwright poses a challenge to native speakers of English due to the archaic use of English, but to a person that studies English as a second language things can get a little overwhelming at times. This is where the creativity and planning of a good teacher come into play. Dedication, the love for the English language, educational and psychological strategies, linguistic knowledge, games, vocabulary tricks and grammar explanations, schemes and drawings are just some of the “tools” that a teacher has to use in order to make Shakespeare appealing to students.
The first shock that EFL students have is when they first read a sonnet or a paragraph from one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. The strange language, the bizarre words that somehow resemble the English language can make understanding Shakespeare like something unattainable, unachievable. Some students end up having “Shakespeare-fright” and this is where the real, hard work of a teacher begins.