The Chinese Universities Shakespeare Festival as an Extracurricular Activity Exemplifying Prominent Approaches to English Language Learning

Abstract

In this chapter, Olive explores the Chinese Universities Shakespeare Festival (CUSF), which brought university students from across greater China together in Hong Kong to rehearse and perform twenty-minute Shakespeare scenes. She considers the way in which the organisers’ and participants’ constructions of the CUSF align with Amos Paran and Pauline Robinson’s taxonomy of approaches to literature and its use in the English as an Additional Language (EAL) classroom as a body of knowledge, language practice material and stimulus for personal development. The chapter also offers the most extensive consideration, available in English, of the festival’s ten seasons at a time when the festival’s online archives are disappearing as institutional websites are renewed. The chapter concludes by considering whether CUSF provides a model for other higher education institutions staging Shakespeare in countries where English is usually learnt as an additional language. In doing so, it articulates some improvements that might strengthen any successors.