Learning Japanese Culture with Shakespeare

　This paper is a reflective practice and study of the development of a content-based intermediate English course (over 550 TOEIC score) at a university in Japan. The design of this course utilized scaffolding strategies (Pawan 2008) to provide content and language integrated learning (CLIL) in the classroom. While planning to teach a basic cross-cultural communication (CCC) topics curriculum, a perceived need arose to design a course of study where students can critically engage in analysis from many cultural perspectives. In addition, another requirement of this course was that it must be capable of supporting L1 and L2 students of multiple levels of English ability from native level to intermediate English learners. It was decided to utilize a film studies curriculum allowing students to gain knowledge of this particular skill. With a rich catalogue of films to choose, the scaffolding of learning film analysis techniques leads students on a path of awareness that enables them to compare and contrast differences in film versions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The end result was a course that raised student motivation and awareness to explore further outside the classroom thus creating autonomous students learning a language.

論説 (Articles)