Teaching Shakespeare to ESL Students

Ms. Miriam Lau Leung-che is a lecturer at Hong Kong Community College, Polytechnic University, where she teaches academic English. She has published papers in Shakespeare Review and Nordlit, and she is currently doing her doctoral studies at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham.
Dr. Anna Tso is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Open University of Hong Kong, where she heads the Master of Arts in Applied English Linguistics, leads the English Cultural Literacy team, and directs the Digital Humanities Research Centre. She is currently awarded a government research grant for improving university students' academic writing at the Open University of Hong Kong.

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.

Provides a preface on 'Shakespeare and the teaching of language' by Prof. Michael Dobson, Director of the Shakespeare Institute, The University of Birmingham, UK

Foreword.- Introduction: Global Shakespeare.- Introduction: Asian and Hong Kong Shakespeare.- A Brief Overview of Shakespeare's Life, Times and Work.- The Taming of the Shrew.- Section 2: The Merchant of Venice.- Romeo and Juliet.- Macbeth.- Glossary.