Teaching Shakespeare to Struggling Readers
We followed a social media conversation the other day started by a teacher whose students flat out refused to participate in a daily 10–15 minute SSR period, looking her in the eye while carrying on with their phone business and side conversations.
The media is full of reports about the learning loss students incurred during the pandemic, some sources reporting that students need an average of 4.1 months of additional schooling to catch up in reading.
Stories like these are disheartening enough, but as English teachers, we are tasked with the impossible: getting this audience to successfully read, comprehend, analyze, and write about a wide variety of rigorous texts. How are we supposed to motivate our students to stick with us through a challenging text that is decades, if not centuries, old when they won’t read the latest YA book being touted on #BookTok?
Even worse, how are we supposed to teach Shakespeare to struggling readers who can’t read at grade-level, much less Elizabethan English that even we struggle with at times?
Having spent 15 years in classrooms full of struggling readers, some of which was pre-smartphones and most of which was pre-COVID, we’ve had plenty of time to wrestle with this question, and despite the temptation to give up the fight, we still believe teaching Shakespeare* to struggling readers is worth the effort.
*Do we believe in teaching Shakespeare to struggling readers? YES. But before you run away in horror, let us assure you that teaching Shakespeare doesn’t necessarily mean teaching his works from start to finish. Students can get a lot of the benefits from short passages, as you’ll see in some of our suggestions below.
Why Teach Shakespeare to Struggling Readers
So, why keep teaching Shakespeare, born over 450 years ago, to students who would rather sit and stare at the wall than read a book?
We think teaching Shakespeare, even to struggling readers, is important for six key reasons:
#1 Shakespeare tells a good story.
Teen lovers secretly get married a day after falling in love at first sight, despite their families’ bitter rivalry, a decision that eventually leads to a grisly bloody murder-suicide in the family tomb.
A loyal Scottish thane, encouraged by his wife, goes on an increasingly cruel and bloody rampage after three witches suggest he could, one day, become king.
The world’s worst decision maker decides pretending to go insane is the best strategy to avenge his father’s death (at the hands of his uncle . . . who then married his mother), a strategy that results in yet another bloodbath.
Tricked by his jealous best friend’s lies, a Moor strangles his beautiful and beloved wife.
A man joins a conspiracy to kill his best friend, inciting a civil war that rages across the Roman empire.
And don’t even get us started on the love triangles, faked deaths, and mistaken identities that fill the pages of Shakespeare’s comedies.
There is a reason Shakespeare’s work has endured for so long. Once you get past the language, Shakespeare tells great stories full of drama, action, and comedy.
#2 Shakespeare writes about topics that appeal to teenagers.
On the surface, this seems like a bald-faced lie. Plays about a whole lot of European kings who talk funny? How could these appeal to 21st century teenagers?
But really, Shakespeare writes about jealousy, betrayal, lust, love, family, and ambition, topics our students are all too familiar with. The circumstances may be unfamiliar to our students, but the root issues are not.
#3 Shakespeare is part of our shared Western culture.
Whether or not you think Shakespeare should be part of our literary canon, he is. In How to Read Literature Like a Professor, that staple of AP Literature classes, Thomas Foster argues that, aside from the Bible, Greek mythology, and fairy tales, Shakespeare is the most common playground for Western authors.
And he makes a good case. So many familiar words, sayings, stories, and tropes come straight from the pages of Shakespeare. Our students have seen and will see references to Shakespeare, whether they’re reading, binging shows on Netflix, going to the movies, or playing video games.
One of our jobs as English teachers is to help our students build their cultural toolkits, and Shakespeare is an important part of that toolkit. Students who have never engaged with Shakespeare are at a disadvantage in college literature classes, and even students who never pick up a book after high school graduation will benefit from some familiarity.
#4 Shakespeare’s texts give us a lot of bang for our buck.
We’re confident most English teachers will tell you they’re covering significantly fewer texts each year than they did a decade ago. Whether this is good or bad is a whole other topic, but when we’re trying to cover all the content standards with as few texts as possible, Shakespeare’s plays are a goldmine.
Sure, they take us more time to cover and a lot of work to get students engaged, but a quick scan of the ELA Common Core standards for grades 6–12 reveals you could address all but one literature standard and all of the writing standards with one Shakespeare play.
He’s got rich characters and themes, figurative language, irony, and, depending on the play you choose (looking at you, Julius Caesar), speeches ripe for rhetorical analysis. And with dozens of film adaptations to choose from, you certainly have the opportunity to compare representations of the same story in different mediums.
If you teach AP English Literature and Composition, you’ll also find that many of Shakespeare’s tragedies (particularly Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello) will work for almost any Question 3 prompt.
#5 Shakespeare’s writing forces students to use close reading skills.
Close reading is an essential aspect of English Language Arts instruction, but it can be hard to get our students to slow down, read, re-read, and work to understand, especially if they “get” a text on the first read.
With Shakespeare, however, they have no choice. If our students have any hope of understanding the original text, they have to use a dictionary and the footnotes in their book. They have to read a passage a few times to make meaning out of it. They have to figure out why Shakespeare is using figurative language so they’re not lost in a three-page speech that seems completely irrelevant to the plot.
And, unlike in more straightforward pieces (at least in our students’ minds), the close analysis pays off: they actually feel like they got something out of their analysis. Our students understand things better because of the work they put in and occasionally even appreciate the value a specific word or simile adds to the meaning.
Even better, our students can experience this success with a handful of lines from a play or a 14-line sonnet. Our students, especially our struggling readers, are more willing to play along when we make things manageable.
#6 Shakespeare’s works give our students opportunities to develop stamina and resilience.
We’re all for making things easier whenever we can. Movies, episodes of TV shows, excerpts, young adult fiction, news articles: use any and all of them to get your students reading, writing, and thinking.
But our students do need to tackle a big, challenging text every once in a while. In an age where everyone, not just our students, is losing the capacity to focus for long periods of time, it’s good for our students to come back to the same text multiple days in a row, to persevere through a challenge rather than giving up at the first sign of trouble. While we don’t need to develop these skills with every text we teach, it’s worth it once in a while, and when Shakespeare offers us so many other advantages, why not use his texts to do it?
How to Help Struggling Readers Tackle Shakespeare’s Texts
Fine, you might be thinking. I agree that teaching Shakespeare might have its benefits, but how on earth do I do it without losing my mind? Through many years of trial and error, we’ve found at least a few strategies that work for struggling readers.
Focus on themes and emotions your students can relate to.
Confession time here. This took us way too long to learn. We created more than our fair share of PowerPoint presentations and gallery walks to teach students about Shakespeare’s biography, the layout of the Globe Theatre, the controversy over who really wrote his plays, and the conventions of Elizabethan theater.
While we were riveted by this engaging information, we eventually realized that most students, especially our struggling readers, just don’t care.
The more we moved away from our “bardolatry” (def: people idolizing Shakespeare, and yes, it’s a real term), focusing instead on themes our students can actually relate to, the more success we had getting students to buy in. Our students were way more interested in the question of whether Brutus is the worst best friend ever than they were in the history of ancient Roman government.
Spoil the plot for your students.
In general, we’re averse to spoilers, but we set that rule aside for Shakespeare. (And, given that he spoils Romeo and Juliet in the Prologue, we think he’s okay with it.) Teaching Shakespeare is a lot easier when students have a vague idea of the basic plot before they begin reading. No matter what level of course we teach, we preview the story with our students before reading.
Choose your text and version carefully.
The text you use and the version you use matter a lot when teaching Shakespeare to struggling readers.
When selecting a play to read, we recommend choosing a tragedy over a comedy. This seems counterintuitive: wouldn’t our students prefer something that makes them laugh? But so much of the humor in Shakespeare’s plays relies on wordplay, which requires extensive grappling with the language, even for experienced adult readers. So it’s just not worth it (and just not as funny) for our struggling readers, who also find it hard to follow the plots, often full of mistaken identities and love triangles.
When it comes to struggling readers, action takes priority. Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet tend to be more engaging than Hamlet (so much dithering) and Julius Caesar (so much plotting and pondering). You want to choose a play with lots of blood and short scenes that make the reading experience move quickly.
Don’t be afraid of using excerpts. When we have struggling readers, it’s not always worth it to read every single scene. Students can still build their cultural knowledge and resilience by reading alternate versions of the story and looking closely at small but meaningful sections of the original text, and the experience is likely to be more enjoyable for everyone.
Our particular favorite is Leon Garfield’s Shakespeare Stories. Garfield retells each play in approximately 12 pages. Most of the narrative is in prose (rich in figurative language), but Garfield uses Shakespeare’s original text for all the dialogue. The narration helps students understand what’s happening, but they still have some challenging language to grapple with.
Kate’s son, who fell in love with Shakespeare in fifth grade, also introduced us to Gareth Hinds’s graphic novel interpretations of Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, which particularly low students might find helpful. The Young Reader’s Shakespeare versions by Adam McKeown may also be good resources, though they change some details of the stories and do not preserve as much of the original language as Garfield does.
If you’re using the full, original text, we strongly recommend a version with good notes (we like the Folger Shakespeare Library). Shakespeare often uses language differently than we do today, and good notes will help students understand turns of phrase unique to the time period. While we have colleagues who have had great experiences with the No Fear Shakespeare series, and we have used excerpts before, we generally steer away from it so students have to do at least some of the dictionary work.
Guide your students through the play.
If you’re teaching struggling readers, we don’t recommend having students read on their own. Instead, we read the text together, and when we pause (frequently) to discuss what’s going on, we ask questions and model our own process of working through the language.
We also found that, with struggling readers, using professional audio versions tends to work better than having students read the text aloud. Not only does this remove the barrier of listening to inexperienced readers stumble through the language, but hearing the actors’ tone of voice helps students clue into the meaning.
We also like to show video clips throughout the reading process (instead of only at the end) so students can clarify their understanding before moving to a new section of the text.
It’s important for students to complete some sort of study guide to accompany their reading. Even our best students need support to read and comprehend Shakespeare. However, we tend to steer away from analysis questions, even for our PreAP and AP students, focusing instead on comprehension. We save the analysis for in-class activities where students can have support from us and their peers.
Provide opportunities for struggling readers to grapple with the original text.
Even if you use an alternate version of the text for your struggling readers, it’s still important to provide opportunities to close read and grapple with Shakespeare’s original language. Many of the benefits of reading Shakespeare come from interacting with the text and making meaning, even if it’s only small chunks.
Whether you’re working with plays or sonnets, have your students spend time paraphrasing, using a dictionary to look up words they don’t know. We especially like Collins Dictionary because it separates British and American definitions and includes simplified definitions for English learners.
When we have students complete these activities, we like to let them work in groups. Shakespeare’s language is probably the toughest we ask them to grapple with, and we want the experience to be successful and engaging.
Try to incorporate non-traditional activities.
We tended to be most successful teaching Shakespeare to struggling readers when we didn’t try to do conventional activities. The text was already a challenge for students, so we wanted to bring in fun wherever we could, whether it was by having students draw cause-effect timelines, playing emoji matching games, or formatting final projects as crime reports.
The most important thing to keep in mind when teaching Shakespeare to struggling readers is that all of our students can do great things and enjoy these beloved texts, but they need our help to do so. It’s essential to decide ahead of time what you want students to gain from the experience so you can select texts and activities that provide appropriate support.
You don’t, however, have to go through your own process of trial and error to refine the perfect Shakespeare unit for struggling readers. We refined our Julius Caesar unit over the course of 15 years, and we can vouch for its success with struggling readers. Students investigate Caesar’s assassination, completing a crime report with their findings, and then write a business letter to a historian arguing whether Brutus should be viewed as a traitor to the Roman republic or “the noblest Roman of them all.”
The unit comes with an introductory mini-unit in which students complete the crime report assignment for an episode of the TV show Psych, guided reading questions based on the Leon Garfield adaptation for standard-level students and on the original text for PreAP students, a multiple-choice exam, and all the materials they’ll need to conduct a crime investigation and write their business letter to a historian.
What other Shakespeare units do you want to see? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram @threeheads.works as we work to support you in the ways you need most.