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English Detective #52 Shakespeare Revisited: June 2, 2015
June 02, 2015

I just learned about a few very useful resources for introducing Shakespeare to ESL (and other) students. The British Council has some great suggestions on “how to make Shakespeare easy for English Language learners.”

Catch student interest with a movie trailer, then get them familiar with the plot and characters using resources like this BBC page with fake tabloid headlines and short summaries of 12 of Shakespeare’s plays.

Have your students work closely with a little piece of the story, then perhaps study the original alongside a contemporary translation like those on sparknotes (available for 19 of his plays and his sonnets.)



I will be adding a link into the issue 6 text, since people are still checking there, and to the Academic Vocabulary Word List page for that issue, but I wanted to give you a heads up first, if you ever need to teach one of Shakespeare’s plays.

I made a matching exercise for many of the idioms and expressions we get from Shakespeare based. (It's based on a BBC page linked from the EnglishHints page below.) You can download a pdf of it here or see the interactive game on EnglishHints.

Have a great summer!

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Coming in the next issue: Cognates: Language in Common

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