Passage Three

Many years ago, when I was working in a school in Buenos Aires, I was required to teachMacbethto a class of Spanish - speaking schoolboys. I was a bit worried at being given such a task, because Shakespeare’s language is not always easy, even for the native speaker. The language ofMacbethparticularly rich and strange to the modern reader. I myself had seen and read the play for the first time at an early age, and had been carried away by the story. So, I decided to concentrate first on the action and plot, and as far as possible let the language take care of itself.

I read the play to my students, scene by scene, taking the different parts myself. I did not let my pupils read it aloud for themselves, as I thought they lacked necessary experience and skill to benefit from this. At the end of each scene, I saw to it that everybody understood what had happened, and we briefly summarized this in writing. After this, I went through the scene again, explaining those language points that might prevent essential comprehension, and then I read the scene straight through once more.

This was not a very exciting approach. The pupils’ participation was largely passive. I was in fact doing most of the work. However, when we had gone through about half of the play in this manner, I discovered to my great surprise that the class had taken the book home and finished it for themselves. Through my efforts, they had woken up to the idea that the story was exciting, and wanted to know how it turned out in the end.

We went ahead and finished the play, working more rapidly, and went on to discuss and read parts of the play again, focusing on the characters, plots, themes, etc. Without noticing it, we did a lot of practice in oral and written English.