TY - JOUR

T1 - What do students find difficult when they read Shakespeare?

T2 - Problems and solution

AU - Murphy, S.

AU - Culpeper, J.

AU - Gillings, M.

AU - Pace-Sigge, M.

N1 - The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics, 29 (3), 2020, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2020 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics page: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/lal on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/

PY - 2020/8/31

Y1 - 2020/8/31

N2 - Teaching and learning Shakespeare takes place across the world. Pedagogical matters have been the subject of much discussion in the last few decades. This article begins by reviewing that discussion, showing how different approaches – textual, contextual and active (or performance) – connect with the language of the plays. No study, it is pointed out, has conducted an empirical investigation as to what exactly students find problematic when they read the language of Shakespeare’s plays, an obvious first step, one might think, in designing an approach. The main aim of this article was to describe a study designed to do exactly this. It was conducted with two groups of Shakespeare students, one with English as a first language and one with English as an additional language. Participants were asked to identify difficulties in extracts from plays, rate specific linguistic forms according to difficulty and discuss what they think of Shakespeare’s language. Common areas of difficulty included archaic words, borrowings from other languages, coinages and false friends. With these findings in mind, the article briefly reflects on pedagogical solutions that are corpus-related, arguing that these address some of the problems associated with traditional textual approaches by requiring the active involvement of learners, treating language in a contextualised fashion and focussing on the language itself. © The Author(s) 2020.

AB - Teaching and learning Shakespeare takes place across the world. Pedagogical matters have been the subject of much discussion in the last few decades. This article begins by reviewing that discussion, showing how different approaches – textual, contextual and active (or performance) – connect with the language of the plays. No study, it is pointed out, has conducted an empirical investigation as to what exactly students find problematic when they read the language of Shakespeare’s plays, an obvious first step, one might think, in designing an approach. The main aim of this article was to describe a study designed to do exactly this. It was conducted with two groups of Shakespeare students, one with English as a first language and one with English as an additional language. Participants were asked to identify difficulties in extracts from plays, rate specific linguistic forms according to difficulty and discuss what they think of Shakespeare’s language. Common areas of difficulty included archaic words, borrowings from other languages, coinages and false friends. With these findings in mind, the article briefly reflects on pedagogical solutions that are corpus-related, arguing that these address some of the problems associated with traditional textual approaches by requiring the active involvement of learners, treating language in a contextualised fashion and focussing on the language itself. © The Author(s) 2020.

KW - Corpus linguistics

KW - corpus stylistics

KW - language

KW - learning

KW - Shakespeare

KW - stylistics

KW - teaching

U2 - 10.1177/0963947020949441

DO - 10.1177/0963947020949441

M3 - Journal article

VL - 29

SP - 302

EP - 326

JO - Language and Literature

JF - Language and Literature

SN - 0963-9470

IS - 3

ER -