Hear a teacher explaining how she teaches Shakespeare to nonnative English speakers
Tips on teaching Shakespeare to nonnative English speakers.
Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library; CC-BY-SA 4.0 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Hamlet confronts his mother and mistakenly kills Polonius in Act III, scene 4, of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
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Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library; CC-BY-SA 4.0 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)A look at all four “states” of the Martin Droeshout engraved portrait of William Shakespeare, first published with the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare's plays.
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Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library; CC-BY-SA 4.0 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)Teacher tips on how to avoid problems while introducing Shakespeare to elementary students.
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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.“Now I am alone. Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I,” begins Hamlet's soliloquy (Hamlet, Act II, scene 2).
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Transcript
SPEAKER: Whenever I teach Shakespeare to a class that has non-native speakers in it, I've learned that it's very important to make them feel comfortable with the language first. So, in order to do that, I give them each an index card with a famous death line from a variety of Shakespeare plays. They have to read the death line and understand it, before they say their line and fall dead on the ground. So, by the end of the activity all the students are lying dead on the ground. Of course, I always do it along with them, and I take my favorite line from Romeo and Juliet, "Thus with a kiss I die," before my own dramatic end.
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