How relevant is Shakespeare to the study of English as a foreign language ? Indeed, how relevant is English literature in general to the study of the world's lingua franca ? Globalisation has brought with it the need for millions of people of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds to communicate simply and effectively using a language they both understand. For better or worse., English has come to fulfil this need. Whether English poetry, prose and drama or the Bard himself have any place in the scheme of things in ELT at present is a question we cannot answer without asking why the world is learning English in the first place.

For a long time, it was assumed that people wanted to learn English because they were interested in the culture of the native speakers of English. A closer look at the linguistic needs of the learner has exploded this myth. What learners wanted was to do business in English, study abroad or make friends Another controversial axiom in ELT has been that you cannot learn a foreign language if you do not at the same time learn the culture of its native speakers. This, too, has given way to an intercultural model of language acquisition which foregrounds the culture of the learner rather than the culture of the native speaker. The work on linguistic imperialism by Philipson, Pennycook and Canagarajah has sensitized the English language teaching profession to charges of imposing the native speaker's culture onto the non-native speaker, whose objective in learning the language may be largely practical. But have we thrown out the baby with the bathwater ?

What can Shakespeare offer the learner of English as foreign language ?

There was a time, at least up to the end of the nineteenth century, when the dominant approach to foreign language was the Grammar-Translation method. Much of this method in the early stages was based on made up sentences designed to illustrate a grammatical point (This is the pen of my aunt) but advanced students at least were rewarded with extracts from English literature as a way into the culture of the native-speaker of English. This methodological hotch-potch of grammatical analysis, translation and belles-lettres was challenged by the more empirically based Natural or Direct Methods. Spearheaded by scholars like Henry Sweet and Harold Palmer the study of English became more scientific. The model for methods of teaching was based on the way children were presumed to learn their mother-tongue. Literary language was not paramount in the way parents spoke to their children and soon the role of literature began to fade from the foreign language classroom to be replaced by grammatical structures and everyday situations.

And Shakespeare did not frequently come up in everyday situations. Syllabuses for teaching EFL came to be based on situations such as At the Post Office and At the Railway Station and Macbeth is not a frequent topic of conversation while you are waiting for stamps. The American-generated audio-lingual approach reduced the syllabus to its linguistic bare bones, shaking off the superfluity of iambic pentameter in favour of structures and minimal pairs.

However, if students ever reached an advanced level and had no more grammatical structures to consume they were kept busy with literature, which was seen as a window onto the culture of Britain and America. At the same time, George Elliot and TS Eliot would expose students to the rich idiomatic texture of real English. Literature was and is still seen as a vehicle for increasing the advanced learner's vocabulary. (It is difficult to imagine even the advanced learner making much use of the vocabulary in Henry V). The University of Cambridge Examinations Syndicate used to offer the Diploma to these elite language learners. The Diploma was a course in literature and culture and one of its three literature papers was devoted to the plays of Shakespeare. The Diploma, which I taught with great pleasure, is now defunct. There was little demand for it.

The demise of the literature-based Cambridge Diploma is a sign of the times . English Language Teaching has become an industry and is a huge income earner for Britain and the USA. ELT is as subject to market forces as any other consumer product or service. The teaching of English to millions of clients around the globe has become too important to be left to amateurs. The increasing professionalisation of ELT has sidelined the literature specialist and brought in the needs analyst. The design and distribution of English as a consumer product has become more and more sophisticated and the bottom line is "who is prepared to pay for Shakespeare ?"

From the 70 onwards, ELT methodology came under the influence of speech act theory which gave us the Functional Syllabus. The kind of language considered relevant here was utilitarian: ordering a meal in a restaurant, apologizing, making requests and so on. Again, Keats and Shakespeare do not meet your needs when you are ordering a meal in a restaurant or saying you're sorry. Indeed, Needs Analysis became the dominant framework for determining the Communicative Syllabus. In its pure form, this led to English for Specific Purposes (ESP) whose aim was to meet the needs of the learner as accurately as possible. Students, especially adults, are prepared to pay very high fees for such tailor-made courses. In short, Communicative Syllabus Design analyses literature and Shakespeare out of the picture. But have we thrown out the baby with the bathwater ?

In defining the teaching of English in essentially business terms (the discourse of 'bums of seats' is characteristic of teacher-management encounters) are we in fact short changing the learner in educational terms ? If we broaden the terms of Needs Analysis to include educational criteria and what little we know about language acquisition, we may find that an exclusive diet of structures and functions is not the best way to make the language memorable. If our job as teachers, course designers and managers is ultimately to create the conditions in which successful acquisition can take place and not to feed the learner a pre-packaged syllabus, then Shakespeare may still have a place. His place will not be down the learners' throat, but one strand in an awareness of language in action. Recent paradigm shifts in ELT largely under the influence of the various so-called Humanistic Approaches have highlighted the need to engage the learner in the learning process - this means engaging them as individuals with emotions and opinions, not merely as Language Acquisition Devices.

A cognitive-affective approach to teaching English as a foreign language sees language in the service of self-expression; language as the interface between cultures; language as a tool for naming the world and interacting with it; language not only for getting things done in the utilitarian sense but also for expressing ideas and feelings. Clearly, the language of The Tempest is useless, functionally speaking, but it has the power to sensititize any learner of English to how language works to express the Self and this is something engineers and business people also have and may wish to express as they go about the world building bridges and signing contracts. In short, we can see the usefulness of Shakespeare from two perspectives: from the point of view of the learner and from that of the teacher. For learners who have reached a level capable of coping with the linguistic difficulties of the text, Shakespeare can bring them into contact with language that expresses a wide range of human emotions in its most powerful and memorable form.

Although the learner will not be able to use speeches from Hamlet when writing a business letter, the universal problems faced by the Prince of Denmark may motivate the learner to engage with the foreign language in ways which an outdated newspaper article or a mundane dialogue in a textbook may fail to. Intermediate and advanced students' performance in examinations is widely regarded as more successful when they have included a set text in their study of the language. Though the term is slightly off-putting, the 'set text' recycles language in natural and memorable contexts and if even if the language in the case of Shakespeare is not bang up-to-date it can serve as a catalyst for a wide range of linguistic skills: language awareness, discussion, role-play and writing tasks.

For the teacher, Shakespeare's plays provide the most powerful example of effective communication in the English language. Insofar as language teachers are in the business of communication, Shakespeare should be worthy of study. A Shakespeare play, performed well (or read well) is a paradigm of what effective language teaching should be: it engages the attention of the listener and keeps it; it makes you remember the message and it may even have an impact on you for the rest of your life.

It may be that the good language teacher has something in common with Shakespeare's 'lunatic, the lover and the poet' who have the capacity to transform reality through the use imagination to give a name and shape to' airy nothing'. The teacher may well find an unmotivated class of teenagers or tired adults an airy nothing that needs to be transformed into an energised group of keen language learners. The good teacher gives a local habitation and name to learners' explicit needs and often unstated wants. The process of transformation of experience through language into something rich and strange, so characteristic of Shakespeare's plays, is one that language teachers can learn from when considering the nature of good language teaching.

A shorter version of this article appeared in Guardian Weekly, May 18 2000, as 'Bring Back the Bard'.