Words, Words: Reading Shakespeare With English Language Learners

For hundreds of years we have cherished the plays, writings, and poetry of William Shakespeare. The stories of this Renaissance author are historically famous and are consistently studied and performed today, and he will live on to be one of the most famous writers to have ever lived. When thinking of his work, he is known for the way he writes and the certain dialect he uses throughout all his plays. It is a unique form of dialect, and in modern times some pieces can be hard to understand and follow, especially during a Shakespearian performance. Overall his writing consist of metaphors and conceits which are not only clever, but what drives his poetry. We may currently have trouble understanding his text without the help of translation, but

We read and perform in Shakespearian plays and need to know what they mean and how to dissect the meaning behind them. This can be difficult especially for high schoolers, but Christina Porter, a high school literacy coach, writes the article “Words, Words, Words: Reading Shakespeare with English Language Learners,” how she teaches his work to high schoolers. I found it interesting how important it was to teach this especially because he created some of the ways we speak today. Also it is a requirement in schools to learn his plays, and trying to make it enjoyable for high schoolers can be difficult, especially if they do not understand what they are reading about. In the article, she talks about her teaching plan such as exploring the complexities and details of Modern English. She started teaching the high schoolers A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Julius Caesar but would only teach the parts that were climactic. She learned it was not as important to teach them the anticlimactic parts because it was not as enjoyable. “I do not want ELLs to feel immediately overwhelmed by unfamiliar language, and I do not want to set a precedent that reading Shakespeare means the teacher reads while the bored students act as passive participants in the process.” (46) Having the high schoolers involved by looking at visuals and actually performing the lines were also great ways for them to connect to the pieces. Shakespeare was a repetitive writer and most of his writing can reflect on that. He uses the same base for certain plots and relationships between characters and you can compare certain scenes from his work, which can make it easier to understand. Porter put some of Shakespeare’s work together like father and daughter relationships from The Tempest (Prospero and Miranda) and Othello (Desdemona and Brabantio) or scenes with two lovers like Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth (Macbeth and Lady