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.