Shakespeare as a second language: playfulness, power and pedagogy in the ESL classroom

Abstract

This article presents an argument for the inclusion of Shakespeare in the senior high school ESL (English as a Second Language) curriculum in Taiwan, to be taught through a physical, participatory pedagogy in line with the approaches of drama education in general and those currently being promoted by the education department of the UK-based Royal Shakespeare Company in particular. Bakhtin and Bourdieu provide a pragmatic and political rationale for this argument but Guy Cook's writing on language play is the key theoretical influence, with the work of Cicely Berry presenting a model for the kind of intensely playful pedagogy that is needed to turn Cook's theory into practice. The article is clear that such an approach, far from being culturally oppressive for non-Anglophone students, can, on the contrary, be seen as personally liberating. In being freed, albeit temporarily, from the pedagogical formalities of the classroom and the formalistic, moralising tendencies of the course book, the student participants in this research achieved high levels of personal and emotional involvement and were stimulated by the verse, the plots and the pedagogy into complex, reflective engagement with the themes, issues and above all the language of the plays.

Keywords:

• Language play
• educational drama
• Shakespeare
• second language learning

Notes

1. An associated question, somewhat unfortunately phrased, suggests that students discuss the greatest act of love they have ever performed!

2. In response to a structural theory of language and a behaviouristic theory of language learning, Chomsky proposed his own, highly influential view of linguistics in 1959. In his view, universal grammar can be seen in two senses. First, it refers to the genetically determined cognition which makes language learning possible, universal grammar being a biological endowment determined by genetic cognition. In its second sense, universal grammar attempts to capture the logically or conceptually necessary parts of a language, thus assuming that there are features common to all languages (Chomsky 2005, 28–9, 69).

3. As an amusing but telling example, what sense could they make of the following sign, seen outside a camping store near Northampton, UK? ‘Now is the discount of our winter tents.’ See Carter (2004).

4. The significance of this word as the one Shakespeare himself would have used in this context is self-evident.

5. Junior high school students are streamed into different schools by the scores they get in the Senior High School Entrance Exam. All the students in this girls’ senior high school can take the selection exam developed by the special education centre if they have a particular interest in receiving a curriculum that has an emphasis on the English and Chinese language courses.

6. For the analysis in this article, we draw on data from the students’ journals, questionnaires and the interview.

7. Unless stated otherwise, all comments from students were written or spoken in English.

8. A fuller description of the scheme of work for Macbeth can be found in Chapter 9 of Second Language Learning Through Drama (Winston 2011). The chapter also contains additional theoretical reflections.

9. The names of the students are not anonymised. This is with their agreement. As one ventured: ‘But our English names are fictitious anyway’.