Taking Students to Shakespeare: the Language of Shakespeare Meets the Language of Pop.

This paper aims to introduce classroom techniques that can be used to assist English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) learners in their comprehension and appreciation of the creative word in the form of contemporary pop songs and of texts written in non-contemporary varieties of English (i.e. Shakespeare's Early Modern English). Emphasis will be put on the basic yet often neglected (in the ESOL classroom) morpho-syntactical differences between standard and non-standard and between contemporary and older varieties of English. The juxtaposition of the language of a revered and legendary writer, such as Shakespeare, to that of supposedly more mundane and more transitory pop music is not merely a ploy to excite students’ curiosity; comparison of these two, at first sight, radically different genres, will also highlight the fact that both the Early Modern English of Shakespeare and colloquial varieties of English typical of pop songs today share two basic features: they both constitute expressions of creativity and, linguistically, they can all be treated as non-standard forms when compared to the contemporary standard British English or General American as taught to most ESOL students today.