Shakespeare as a second language: playfulness, power and pedagogy in the ESL classroom

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Shakespeare as a second language:playfulness, power and pedagogy in theESL classroomAstrid Yi-Mei Cheng a & Joe Winston aa Institute of Education, University of Warwick , Coventry, CV47AL, UKPublished online: 18 Nov 2011.

To cite this article: Astrid Yi-Mei Cheng & Joe Winston (2011) Shakespeare as a second language:playfulness, power and pedagogy in the ESL classroom, Research in Drama Education: The Journalof Applied Theatre and Performance, 16:4, 541-556, DOI: 10.1080/13569783.2011.617101

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Shakespeare as a second language: playfulness, power andpedagogy in the ESL classroom

Astrid Yi-Mei Cheng* and Joe Winston

Institute of Education, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK

This article presents an argument for the inclusion of Shakespearein the senior high school ESL (English as a Second Language)curriculum in Taiwan, to be taught through a physical, participatorypedagogy in line with the approaches of drama education ingeneral and those currently being promoted by the educationdepartment of the UK-based Royal Shakespeare Company inparticular. Bakhtin and Bourdieu provide a pragmatic and politicalrationale for this argument but Guy Cook’s writing on languageplay is the key theoretical influence, with the work of CicelyBerry presenting a model for the kind of intensely playful pedagogythat is needed to turn Cook’s theory into practice. The article isclear that such an approach, far from being culturally oppressive fornon-Anglophone students, can, on the contrary, be seen aspersonally liberating. In being freed, albeit temporarily, from thepedagogical formalities of the classroom and the formalistic,moralising tendencies of the course book, the student participantsin this research achieved high levels of personal and emotionalinvolvement and were stimulated by the verse, the plots and thepedagogy into complex, reflective engagement with the themes,issues and above all the language of the plays.

The learning of English to a high level of proficiency is seen asparticularly important for those students in Taiwanese senior highschools who are judged to be the most academically gifted; they areexpected, after all, to become the future political, economic andbusiness leaders of the country. The content of their English courseworkis consequently seen as significant and the text books they arepresented with are dominated by topics relevant to global economicdevelopment and others intended to inform them about the world,its history and its cultures. In a popular example published by San Ming,chapters are devoted to such topics as the trade in coffee, the recyclingof resources and the Taj Mahal. The pedagogical approach encouraged

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and PerformanceVol. 16, No. 4, November 2011, 541�556

ISSN 1356-9783 print/ISSN 1470-112X online

# 2011 Taylor & Francis

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by these books is, however, expositional and conservative. The teacheris expected to introduce each unit with a vocabulary list that studentswill then learn before translating the text together in class andembarking on a series of comprehension and written exercises intendedto re-enforce the new vocabulary and key grammatical structures thatthe text has contrived to introduce. The shortcomings of these coursebooks stretch beyond the narrowness of their pedagogic approaches,however. The texts presented vary little in tone, genre or style;their content is invariably ‘safe’ and, far from acknowledging whatmight be of personal interest to the average intelligent 17-year-old, theyare dominated by a moralistic sensibility that may well be laudable in itsdesire to promote positive human values but is often overly pious orsentimental in its tone and content. In the unit on the Taj Mahal,for example, students are encouraged to respond personally to thestory of how it came to be built by writing about what they would do toremember a lost loved one or pet. A model answer is offered which,as well as exemplifying the conditional tense, presents a somewhatmawkish narrative in which the author suggests they would plant a treein a yard, bury their dog’s ashes beneath it, and daily share their secretswith the tree whilst imagining the dog was listening.1

This article does not set out to deny that some students may wellsuccessfully learn English grammar and vocabulary from textbookssuch as this; nor does it set out to attack the culturally situated,Confucian sensibilities that are evident in some of their content. It will,however, strongly suggest that these students would benefit from aradically different approach to learning English that should at leastcomplement this diet of formal textbooks. Very specifically, it willargue for the potential benefits for them of learning Shakespearethrough the pedagogic practices of educational drama, in particularthose developed by the Royal Shakespeare Company under theinfluence of its long-standing voice director, Cicely Berry. In doing so,we will root our case squarely within theories of language learning andsuggest that educational drama in general, and Shakespeare inparticular, can provide rich resources to address some of the linguisticand socio-cultural shortcomings of existing ESL (English as a SecondLanguage) teaching as evidenced in senior high schools in Taiwan.In particular, we will concentrate upon the need for students to begiven access to cultural capital, as well as formal linguistic competence,within the framework of English; and upon the theoretical importanceof the play element in language learning and its potential to meet thisprecise function. Although our arguments are based in theories of

542 A.Y.-M. Cheng and J. Winston

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language learning, they also position the personal, human interests ofESL learners as central and suggest that those who would prioritiseeconomic needs over personal fulfilment are, in the case of ESLlearning, working from a false dichotomy.

Theoretical influences on second language teaching

The model of second language learning as typified by Taiwanesetextbooks is greatly influenced by Chomskyan linguistic theory.Chomsky proposed that due to the presence of an innate universalgrammar, children learn language systematically.2 Language is thusseen as a static, bounded system with language pedagogy thereforeconcentrating on enabling learners to memorise and master sets ofwords and rules. This reductive idea of transmitting English language asa set of normative forms has been effectively challenged by theoristssuch as Searle (1974), Halliday (1973, 1975) and Widdowson (1978, 2003)who have offered a more socio-cultural perspective on language learn-ing. This approach takes into account the interactive and contextualessence of language use. From such a perspective, language does notfunction as a bounded, invariant structural system; instead, it developsits shape in its ‘locally situated uses’ (Hall 2002, 10). To borrow PaulHopper’s notion of emergent grammar (Hopper 1987, 142), languagestructures, rather than prerequisites to actual language uses, should beunderstood as emergent properties of linguistic contexts. The locallysituated and emergent nature of language implies an on-going anddynamic process through which language uses are conventionalised byparticular groups of people in the accomplishment of particular goals.In other words, languages do not come to us as fixed, formal templates,abstracted from meaning. Built up over time and from past uses,they come to us with intentions already embedded within them.

Bakhtin’s notion of dialogicality best illustrates this relationalcharacter of language meanings. It argues that the meaning oflanguage resides in the relational character between the historicaland the present. Bakhtin maintains that:

The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ onlywhen the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent,when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic andexpressive intention. (Bakhtin 1981, 293)

This view � that language is both value and meaning laden � has greatimplications for ESL research and practice. Since it is ‘shot through with

Research in Drama Education 543

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intentions and accents’ (1981, 293), language carries inherent ideologiesand creates power relations as participants put it into use in particularways. Human agency is able to make these utterances active by‘manipulating their conventional meanings in such a way as to createour unique stances toward our locally situated interactive positions’(Hall 1995, 213). Therefore, to create utterances is to create oneself,a concept that stresses the importance of human agency for theproficient second language learner. In particular, Bakhtin’s theory of‘active double-voiced utterances’ (1981) is significant here and thephrase itself is worthy of attention. ‘Active’ implies the significance ofthe language user consciously making an informed decision whereas‘double’ suggests the interplay of historical meanings being used forone’s own purposes. This second aspect is especially significant for ESLlearners, particularly as, for better or for worse, English has become themost prominent international language through which people ofdifferent languages tend to communicate. If they become able toappreciate historical nuances of meaning and apply them purposefullyto immediate contexts, they will be more adept at constructingparticular identities in relation to native English speakers and less likelyto be perceived as in some sense culturally and linguistically deficient.

So that this capability can become more accessible for theseTaiwanese students, we propose that their ESL curriculum needs topay attention to the robust socio-cultural forces embedded in English.Michael Halliday’s writings are pertinent here. He argues that language,as a socio-cultural resource, is constituted by ‘a range of possibilities,an open-ended set of options in behavior that are available to theindividual in his existence as a social man’ (1973, 49). By selecting fromthe linguistic resources available, individuals define themselves inrelation to those they are communicating with. Pedagogically, this isbest understood in its negative sense. Without access to the multiplepossibilities and options embedded in the English language, learnerswill be less able to function socially, less likely to create active double-voiced utterances and hence less able to assert themselves inter-nationally. For native English speakers, social class can become alinguistic cage to trap them in particular registers of language use(Bernstein 1975, 2000) whereas for ESL students, a similar cage in aglobalised world would be to be deprived of the subtle depthof cultural and linguistic resources available to educated nativespeakers. In order to help learners operate on a more equal foot-ing in international terms, an ESL curriculum should attempt tomake accessible the conventionalities of English language that bind


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English-speaking communities together, and make apparent the valuesand power structures that underlie these conventionalities.

There is an intricate connection between Bakhtin’s notion of ‘activedouble-voiced utterances’ and Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital.According to Bourdieu, cultural capital exists in an embodied state,as dispositions of body and mind; in an objectified state, as culturalartefacts; and in an institutionalised state, which imbues cultural capitalwith the values it guarantees (2006, 106�9). As a socio-cultural re-source that encompasses the three states, language can be seen as anembodiment of cultural capital. As McLaren points out, collectivelycultural capital represents ‘ways of talking, acting, modes of style,moving, socializing, forms of knowledge, language practices,and values’ (2003, 93). Juxtaposing Bakhtin and Bourdieu, we cometo the realisation that pedagogical resources that contain culturalcapital are crucial for ESL learners who may be expected to use Englishin international settings where the kind of cultural knowledgeshared by English-speaking communities is implicitly valued. Withoutthis knowledge, they must always be perceived as less competent,more ‘foreign’, no matter how correct their grammar and howimpressive their functional language use might be.

It is, of course, a short jump from considering issues of culturalcapital within the English language tradition to the repertoire ofShakespeare’s plays. But we strongly believe that to advocate hisinclusion in a tertiary ESL curriculum for Taiwanese students is far frombeing some kind of post-imperialist surrender to anglocentric culturalaggression. From a political perspective, it can be viewed as a prag-matic response to the value-laden nature of language use as arguedabove. On a more immediate level for these students, we believe that itcan help fill a vacuum at the heart of their curriculum comprisedof a triad of absences: the cultural, the intellectual and the playful.Their current experience of English as typified in the examplesprovided at the beginning of this article is devoid of intellectualinterest beyond the formal grasp of grammar and vocabulary.The cultural references in the texts they study are superficial andtake the form of stories with no literary merit or the straightforwardprovision of factual information. They are devoid of cultural capital andwill not provide students with the resources to create or understandactive double-voiced utterances. The significance of Shakespeare tothese latter can be testified in the numerous quotations, references andjokes that allude to his language, his plays and his themes, not only inself-consciously cultured discourse but in the politics, advertising and


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journalism of English-speaking communities.3 Finally, and perhapsmost significantly, we have included the playful in this triad for reasonsthat embrace pedagogic principles (the need to make the classroom amore active, stimulating environment) but also, crucially, the impor-tance of the play element in language use and language learning astheorised specifically by Guy Cook. It is this we will now consider beforeturning to its illustration in the work of Cicely Berry.

The play element in second language learning

Cook (2000) proposes that current ESL curricula, including thoseinfluenced by the socio-cultural theories outlined above, fail toacknowledge the central importance of the play element in languagelearning. He argues that language play works on three interlockinglevels: the formal, the semantic and the pragmatic. The formal levelrefers to the rhythm and repetition of linguistic forms, the kind ofplayful language that starts in childhood with nursery rhymes andskipping chants and continues through our human lives in the form ofprayers, songs and verse (Cook 2000, 11�34). The semantic level refersto our proclivity to create fictions and fantasies and to be attractedrather than repelled by new, unknown or opaque uses of language. It isat this level that we enjoy the incongruous, the random and the absurdelements of language and the temporary freedom they allow usfrom conventional meaning and the tyranny of rationality that governsmost of our social interactions. The pragmatic relates to the ways inwhich such playful uses of language are essentially communal, creatingsolidarity and/or competitiveness, a sense of enjoyment and/or value,a sense of congregation or intimate interaction. So a skipping chant inthe playground might use some nonsense language that nonethelesssuggests a boy-meets-girl scenario whilst creating the patternedrhythm for a game which has both participants and onlookers,provides a sense of competition as well as purposeful togetherness,and allows for demonstrations of skill to be admired and emulated.A song and dance band, a religious ceremony or, indeed, the per-formance of a play demonstrate these three interlocking levels at anadult level. Cook is fascinated by the ways in which language play thusdefined, as opposed to the transactional processes that dominate theESL classrooms, are what take up most of our human energiesand constitute the greater part of our experience of language � ourpersonal fantasies, our listening to and sharing of stories and jokes,our uttering of prayers and singing of songs, the language common in


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our cultural, religious and sporting activities and so on. Cook’sconclusion is that language play, far from being trivial and negligible,is central to our learning, creativity and intellectual development andthat this should be recognised and consequently made room for in anESL curriculum.

A particularly relevant point he makes refers to the tendency ofexisting curricula to concentrate upon what he calls ‘the day to day,unemotional transactional encounters of modern urban existence’(Cook 2000, 62). Referring to this as ‘the Bulge’ (Wolfson 1988),he stresses how this is the very area in our lives in which playfullanguage is least evident. At either end of this bulge, in contrast,we have on the one hand the language of intimacy � with our closefriends and family � and on the other the language of aggression andundisguised power. These, he argues, are not only the key sites oflanguage play but also provide the instances of language that mostfascinate us, as evidenced in any example of popular drama, whetherTV soap, costume drama or Shakespearean tragedy. As he comments:

It is strange that many current approaches to language learning assume,without either reflection or evidence, that it is the mundane transac-tional discourse of modern work rather than the ancient, playfuldiscourse concerning intimacy and power, which should stimulateinterest in language learning. There is a confusion between what isrelevant and what is motivating. (Cook 2000, 160)

With regard to the language of aggression and power, Cook acknowl-edges the need to avoid actual antagonism in the classroom and seesliterature as the best means to allow it in at a safe, emotional distance.The pedagogies developed by Cicely Berry, however, provide us with apedagogical model that permits deep engagement with such lan-guage, the aggressive as well as the intimate, the darkly passionate aswell as the tender, the kind of language play indeed that pervades theplays of Shakespeare. Also, and very significantly, they make explicitand purposeful room for the core playful values of randomness andabsurdity, the very antithesis of the content to be found in the averageESL textbook.

Playing with the language of Shakespeare: the example of CicelyBerry

To help actors or ‘players’4 understand their lines, Berry suggests thatthey need to access the ‘tactile nature of the sound’ through intensely


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physical movement activities, such as running and jumping, designedto release the energies latent in Shakespeare’s language (1993, 104).As she comments: ‘we have to find ways to get them (the lines) notonly on our tongue, but to make them part of our whole physical selfin order to release them from the tyranny of the mind’ (1993, 22).She insists that players need a physical experience as it is physical forceand energy that will bring alive the character’s state of mind.Physicalising the lines, not literally but in order to grasp the spirit ofthe picture, will, she argues, illuminate the interplay between imageand intention. Some of her suggested activities, such as alternatelyshouting then whispering the lines of a dialogue, appear irrational inthe sense that they do not correspond to any initial sense ofgrammatical meaning, but Berry explains their validity as follows:‘What happens is this: because it is a slightly absurd thing to do,and you cannot make sense in a conventional way, you allow thesounds to make their own sense’ (1993, 149). Bizarre, unexpected,surprising, unconventional, absurd � these qualities are the very stuff ofBerry’s approach and they chime readily with the inherent appeal ofthe semantic level of language play as theorised by Cook. It should benoted that none of these qualities need equate with irrelevance; and,in practical terms, Berry insists that, in working against conventionalrationality, they serve to provoke a personalised connection betweenplayer and text, between the person of the speaker and the substanceof the language itself.

Berry’s strategies are various. For example, she may ask players toplay with a random series of objects as they deliver a soliloquy; or towalk about the studio changing direction at each punctuation mark;or to read particular lines omitting all the consonants in the belief thatsuch exercises can inspire fresh interpretations and perspectives. Whatmay emerge are possible symbolic connections between character,object and language; or moments of specific confusion in a character’smind, as a player finds herself changing rapidly from one direction toanother; or, in the example of Ophelia’s soliloquy (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene1), a sense of keening and lamentation hidden within the vowels:

Oh woe is me,

T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see.

Berry is particularly interested in the strength and muscularity ofShakespeare’s language and taps into the aggression within scenes ofconfrontation and latent violence by playing games which involve both


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physical restraint and aggressive action. So, for example, two playersmay pin another to the floor while he struggles as hard as he can tobreak free as he reads his lines; or, as in Act 1, Scene 2 of The Tempest,she will instruct the player reading Caliban’s lines to attempt as hard ashe can to get to Prospero, instructing the entire group to ensure thathe does not. Such controlled release of violent emotion is driven,she insists, by the power of the meter and rhythm and by the energiesof the consonants and vowels. It can serve to strike up memorable,personal connections between the players and the language of thepoet by tapping into the joy we take in the music of language as wellas in its meaning (Berry 2008, 107). Tellingly, then, if Shakespeare canprovide the kind of content that ESL curricula have neglected � ‘thosepleasurable, emotive and controversial aspects of social interactionwhich are expressed through the genres of play’, as Cook puts it (2000,193) � then Berry provides ways to respond to the pedagogic challengethat this neglect poses to teachers willing to make use of educationaldrama.

Meeting the challenge in practice: an example from research

The scheme of work from which the following examples are drawn waspart of the fieldwork for a doctoral thesis carried out between October2009 and January 2010, in a girls’ senior high school in Taiwan. Astridtaught the class for two hours per week and for 26 hours in total.The central intention of the project was to attempt to map out a sharedspace, both conceptual and practical, for educational drama and ESLstudies, using the teaching of Shakespeare as a specific example forreasons explained above. The class consisted of 32 17-year-old femalestudents, streamed on their entry to senior high school according totheir proficiency in English and Chinese in tests developed by theSpecial Education Centre of the Ministry of Education.5 These studentswere judged to be gifted in both languages and had a strong, vestedinterest in using English in their future careers.

Astrid chose to focus on three plays: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet andMacbeth. Macbeth in particular was included as she thought that thecharacters of both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth would allow thesestudents to explore through language the dark, aggressive passionsand ambitions of a man and a woman, in direct contrast to thesentimental and conventional models of human behaviour offered bythe textbooks. In addition, key speeches are drenched in the languageof both power and intimacy, those two oppositional but related sites of


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language play that Cook identifies as central to human interest butnearly always neglected in the ESL classroom.

The research, then, took the form of a case study and used multiplesources of data to ensure evidence corroboration (Yin 2009, 116).There were two categories of sources: the researcher’s documentation,and the data from the participants, and they are illustrated in Figure 1,adapted from Yin’s diagram.6

The research process was fluid but rigorous. Field notes were takenon site; each session was recorded and before the next one, Astriddocumented her thoughts, reflections and insights in a researchjournal. Students were sometimes asked to write as part of the dramaconventions being used and this writing, too, contributed to the data.At the end of each session, students were asked to reflect in their ownjournals on a question relevant to the content of the session or theactivities. Completion of a journal was entirely voluntary and thosestudents who wished to would offer them for collection on thefollowing day. A semi-structured, focus group interview was adminis-tered on the day of the final session and lasted 50 minutes whilst other,shorter interviews were conducted directly after sessions wheneverAstrid wanted to ask something specific and immediate of particularstudents. Two months after the conclusion of the project, a ques-tionnaire was distributed with a 100% retrieval rate.

Student responses to the project as a whole were extremelypositive. In the questionnaire, only seven students (less than a quarter)specified the difficulty of the language as something that troubled theirenjoyment, with 17 (over half) saying that there was nothing theydisliked about the class and only two offering criticism of any aspect ofits pedagogical approach. Only one student expressed her enthusiasmfor the work in functionalist terms, saying that the beautiful languagewould help her with her writing. Tellingly, the most popular play

Figure 1. Sources of data.


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proved to be Macbeth, with 14 students stating this as their preferenceand 10 of these specifically referring to its dark aspects as those whichparticularly attracted them: ‘it deeply reflects the darker side of humannature’7 wrote one; ‘I like the dark and conflicting emotions’, wroteanother. One girl wrote that she was drawn to Lady Macbeth becauseshe was ‘an ambitious woman who searches for power’. As this offersdirect support for Cook’s point that ESL students will be motivated bythemes of love, intimacy, power and aggression, even when exploredthrough a foreign language, we will concentrate our analysis �a necessarily brief one � around student responses to aspects of thepedagogy that they found particularly appealing in the belief that theytestify directly to the aptness of the previous theoretical discussion.8

A range of activities helped students relate to and explore thedarker themes of the play. To begin with they were asked to passaround a ‘desire ball’ in which they were to imagine they could see oneof their darkest wishes and were invited to share these with the class.The number of responses that included dreams of love, power, fameand ambition made the class laugh but also pointed directly towardsthe themes of the play. Most of the teaching strategies drew explicitlyfrom Berry’s approaches referred to above. In one exercise, for example,students were presented with an edited extract from Lady Macbeth’sspeech in Act 1, Scene 5, which includes her infamous lines: ‘Come yespirits . . . unsex me here . . .’. A range of objects including waterbottles, books and candles were placed on a table and volunteers wereasked to read the lines as Lady Macbeth and, as they did so, to playwith the objects as if building an altar. Later, in groups, students wereasked to work with the same speech and select what they felt to be themost important word from particular lines, expressing them physicallyas well as verbally. With Macbeth’s speech from Act V, Scene 5,‘Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow . . .’, students were asked tovocalise only the vowels of the first two lines and to compare themwith those of the later line ‘that struts and frets his hour upon thestage’. Students readily spotted in this last activity how the lengthy,rounded vowels of the first lines suggest a sense of eternity thatcontrasts with the short, sharp vowel sounds of the second, reflectingas it does the small and petty actions of one individual. Comments intheir journals referred to the ‘creepy’ nature of the altar-buildingexercise, with one girl likening it to the preparation for some kind ofblood sacrifice. A girl who played Lady Macbeth wrote of how heremotions began to ‘pile up’ inside her in parallel to her piling up ofthese objects and another girl who watched this enactment wrote of


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how she could see Lady Macbeth ‘really getting aggressive andambitious’ as the altar was gradually built.

Student responses to the gesture exercise are interesting for whatthey suggest about the language-learning process this approachenables. They wrote in their journals of how discussion amongst theirgroup members and watching the presentations had led to anenhanced and varied understanding of the text in contrast to thekind of straightforward approach toward understanding vocabularythat they were used to. This of course recalls Vygotsky and the zoneof proximal development (ZPD), how social forms of learningcontribute to cognitive development. The comments of Shu-yu,9

however, are particularly telling. She wrote:

Gesturing really makes words come alive. It’s pretty hard to describe, soall I can say is that it gives substance to words that have meanings whichare hard to understand. The most memorable action and key word forme is ‘unsex’, as the word is initially difficult to understand, but whenpaired with an action, it is easy to see what the word means and whyShakespeare chose to use that word in that particular context.

The relationship between word and gesture here suggests thatunderstanding was achieved through a dialogical rather than adeterministic process, with the gesture serving to ‘stretch theimagination out of . . . linguistic boundaries’ (Liu 2002, 61). The gestureshaped the understanding of the language, which in turn shaped thecreation of the gesture. A social and playful learning process such asthis, then, recognises students as resourceful language users andacknowledges their creativity in approaching new knowledge.

We conclude this section with a consideration of three exercisescarried out around Macbeth’s speech in Act 1, Scene 7: ‘If it were donewhen ’tis done, then ’twere well/It were done quickly’. Firstly,the participants read the lines as they walked, changing direction ateach punctuation mark, then discussing what this suggested aboutMacbeth’s mental state. They were then divided into two groups,one of which watched while the other was asked to read the lines untilthey heard the word ‘run’ called out by the teacher, upon which theywere to run to a corner of the room before continuing to read. This wasrepeated several times until the soliloquy was finished whereuponAstrid elicited responses from both groups. Finally, one volunteer wasgiven a ball of thread wrapped around a dagger. All the otherparticipants then positioned themselves in the space and were askedto imagine that they were inside Macbeth’s head. As the volunteer read


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the lines, she brought the thread to one person and continued toanother each time she reached a punctuation mark, changing directionwhenever she felt it appropriate. By the end of the soliloquy, the threadwas completely entangled and Astrid asked the students to write downany phrases that captured the essence of the image they had seenenacted here.

‘It’s very clear’, wrote one student, ‘that every bizarre activity we didis to concretise those abstract things under the sentences’. Anotherhad initially giggled at the instruction and owned up in her journal tonot having initially understood it. In the process, however, she realisedhow the activity was helping her.

It suddenly dawned on me that this interesting instruction is meant tolead us to experience the complexity and dilemma in Macbeth’s mind.Because he is unsure and anxious, his lines are brief and rapid. But whenKing Duncan’s kindness comes to his mind, the pace slows down.

These activities were seen as games by the students. One girl wrote:‘I liked the games we played in class today. We did not have a clearpicture of how and why we were doing that but it didn’t matter’.However, it is evident from student responses that the very unexpect-edness and apparent irrationality of the exercises allowed for otherpossibilities to emerge, which Berry claims ‘can both enlighten andfree the imagination’ (2008, 108). Cathy, for example, the girl whovolunteered to play Macbeth in the third activity, wrote: ‘I didn’t knowI would walk that way � obviously walking in a circle. But I think thatwas also the illustration of Macbeth’s fluctuating mind’. At the end ofthe session, Astrid had a brief conversation with her and her friend,which will serve further to suggest how such a playful activity ‘frees themind from obligation and constraint, it refreshes, rearranges,and provides the free play of ideas on which innovative thinkingdepends’ (Berry 2000, 42).

Cathy: When I was reading the lines, and walking around the space . . .um . . . it was quite complicated (long pause), passing the threads . . .um, I felt anxious, ambitious, and some part of me were nervous, butbut . . . I wanted to do that. I am nervous. I am not sure whether I can dothat. It’s just like Macbeth. I had doubts about this act of murder. But Isaw the knife in the end (raised her voice)!Astrid: How did that make you feel as Macbeth?Cathy: I knew that I had to do this. I wanted to do this . . . no otheroptions. I wonder if my classmates saw the knife.Astrid: Not sure . . . do you think that would have made a difference?


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Cathy: ’cuz . . . ’cuz I was shocked. I stared at it v um . . . I didn’t show it.(Rachel, who was in the thread group, joined in.)Rachel: I did! It all made sense!

Conclusion

The underlying thrust of this article has been to present a theoreticalargument for the inclusion of Shakespeare in the senior high schoolESL curriculum in Taiwan, to be taught through a physical, participatorypedagogy in line with the approaches of drama education in generaland of the Royal Shakespeare Company in particular. If Bakhtin andBourdieu have provided a pragmatic and political rationale for this,Cook has offered one firmly rooted in theories of language learning,with Cicely Berry presenting the kind of intensely playful pedagogythat is needed to turn such theory into practice. We have been at painsto point out that such an approach, far from being culturally oppressivefor these students, can, on the contrary, be seen as personallyliberating. In being freed, albeit temporarily, from the pedagogicalformalities of the classroom and the formalistic, moralising tendenciesof thecourse book, there is evidence that these students achieved highlevels of personal and emotional involvement and were stimulated bythe verse, the plots and the pedagogy into complex, reflectiveengagement with the themes, issues and above all the language ofthe plays. A final, very pertinent point needs to be made about the roleof the teacher in such a classroom, and once again Cook provides it forus. There is always an expert in the many forms of play, he writes:in fiction, the storyteller; in magic, the magician; in games, the referee.These are:

figures whose power rests upon special skills and knowledge rather thancoercion, and whose authority is accepted voluntarily by the players.Perhaps it is to such models as these, rather than those of the managerand facilitator, that the modern teacher should aspire. (Cook 2000, 201)

If, in this case, Shakespeare is the magician, the metaphors for theteacher � of storyteller and referee � underline her role as an authority,as one who is there to disseminate knowledge, but in the form of anarbiter of both the content of the lesson and the play of its formalqualities. These are an apt description for the skill, authority andriskiness of a teacher such as Cicely Berry and are, we hazard, far moreresonant of the vibrancy of the drama classroom at its best than thebland, empty metaphor of ‘facilitation’ could ever suggest.


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Keywords: Language play; educational drama; Shakespeare; second lan-guage learning

Notes

1. An associated question, somewhat unfortunately phrased, suggests thatstudents discuss the greatest act of love they have ever performed!

2. In response to a structural theory of language and a behaviouristic theoryof language learning, Chomsky proposed his own, highly influential viewof linguistics in 1959. In his view, universal grammar can be seen intwo senses. First, it refers to the genetically determined cognition whichmakes language learning possible, universal grammar being a biologicalendowment determined by genetic cognition. In its second sense,universal grammar attempts to capture the logically or conceptuallynecessary parts of a language, thus assuming that there are featurescommon to all languages (Chomsky 2005, 28�9, 69).

3. As an amusing but telling example, what sense could they make of thefollowing sign, seen outside a camping store near Northampton, UK? ‘Nowis the discount of our winter tents.’ See Carter (2004).

4. The significance of this word as the one Shakespeare himself would haveused in this context is self-evident.

5. Junior high school students are streamed into different schools by thescores they get in the Senior High School Entrance Exam. All the studentsin this girls’ senior high school can take the selection exam developed bythe special education centre if they have a particular interest in receiving acurriculum that has an emphasis on the English and Chinese languagecourses.

6. For the analysis in this article, we draw on data from the students’ journals,questionnaires and the interview.

7. Unless stated otherwise, all comments from students were written orspoken in English.

8. A fuller description of the scheme of work for Macbeth can be found inChapter 9 of Second Language Learning Through Drama (Winston 2011).The chapter also contains additional theoretical reflections.

9. The names of the students are not anonymised. This is with theiragreement. As one ventured: ‘But our English names are fictitious anyway’.

Notes on contributors

Astrid Yi-Mei Cheng has a doctorate in Drama and Theatre in Education. Shehas seven years of teaching experience in Taiwanese tertiary schools.

Joe Winston is Professor of Drama and Arts Education at the University ofWarwick and co-editor of Research in Drama Education: the Journal of AppliedTheatre and Performance.


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Documents

Shakespeare as a second language: playfulness, power and pedagogy in the ESL classroom