Shakespeare for ESOL? It turns out it works

One of the things I never expected to be doing as an ESOL teacher was teaching plays by William Shakespeare.

Teaching Shakespeare to non native English speakers might sound tricky, but for young people rebuilding their lives in Bradford these 400 year old stories are helping them find confidence, belonging and a voice.

It started with an email from our performing arts department asking if anyone wanted to join Shakespeare Club. I was teaching level 1 ESOL, and I thought it wasn’t going to be relevant. But…perhaps it might be nice to do something different? So I took my students along. They loved it, and it became part of our curriculum.

Eight years later, it’s grown. Now 250 16-18 year old ESOL learners take part, and this year we’re piloting it with 19 plus learners too.

Using the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) ‘rehearsal room pedagogy’, the classroom becomes a theatre company.

We don’t want to turn our students into actors. The ‘company’ is about teamwork, building confidence and them feeling part of something.

Some students have no English at all when they start, and the learner profile has changed over time. When I started, we had a lot of Eastern European students. Now we have many unaccompanied asylum-seeking children from Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Iran and Iraq.

I always say I’ve got two jobs; teaching English, and helping students feel settled and secure in the UK. For those who don’t have family here, it’s about creating that family atmosphere within the classroom, making them feel like they belong and helping them understand society and British values.

Shakespeare helps with that in a way I didn’t predict. People say, Shakespeare for ESOL?! Even native speakers struggle. But the way we do it makes it accessible.

This year we’re doing Hamlet. The RSC give us a script, then I can edit it down. For E3 and L1, we use the original Shakespeare. For E1 and E2, I rewrite it in very simple English. Then we explore the themes: love and loyalty, relationships, family.

Everyone can relate to those themes. In the safety of the classroom, they bring their own understanding to it. This week we were talking about “to be or not to be”. Students turned it into choices they face: to be or not to be a good student, to be or not to be successful, to be or not to be honest.

At the end of the year, we put on a show. Students take part in the lessons, and the ones who want to perform learn lines. It’s brought cohesion into the department. Students with higher-level language support the lower-level students, and lower-level students want to reach up, even with Shakespearean English, because there’s a kudos in doing it.

There are transferable skills. The techniques we use to unpick Shakespeare help students later with GCSE, because they learn how to handle unfamiliar vocabulary and work out what a speech is really saying.

When we won the Bell Foundation Prize for Excellence in Teaching ESOL, students from previous years told me the difference it had made to them wasn’t about acting but confidence. Former students are now qualifying as nurses, doctors, engineers and IT specialists.

We work with Bradford’s Alhambra Theatre, which offers students the chance to attend workshops and shows. Whilst watching a pantomime, an Afghani student whose father had been kidnapped she said that she forgot all her stress.

There’s a lot of negativity about immigrants and asylum seekers on social media these days. But when you meet these young people, you see that they are amazing: they want to work hard and positively contribute to our community.

Shakespeare’s work, even four centuries on, is helping to support growth in confidence, belonging and an understanding what’s possible for our students’ future selves – and that’s amazing too.