Reading Shakespeare with Young Adults

Front Cover
National Council of Teachers of English, 2009 - Drama - 233 pages

Although the works of William Shakespeare are universally taught in high schools, many students have a similar reaction when confronted with the difficult task of reading Shakespeare for the first time. In Reading Shakespeare with Young Adults, Mary Ellen Dakin seeks to help teachers better understand not just how to teach the Bard's work, but also why. By celebrating the collaborative reading of Shakespeare's plays, Dakin explores different methods for getting students engaged-and excited-about the texts as they learn to construct meaning from Shakespeare's sixteenth-century language and connect it to their twenty-first-century lives. Filled with teacher-tested classroom activities, this book draws on often-taught plays, including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The ideas and strategies presented here are designed to be used with any of the Bard's plays and are intended to help all populations of students-mainstream, minority, bilingual, advanced, at-risk.

From inside the book

Contents

Understanding Words
1
The Functional Vocabulary of Shakespeares Stage Directions
7
Archaic Words
13
Copyright

14 other sections not shown

Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information