Romeo and Juliet Act 1

This resource pack contains five worksheets: one for each scene in Act I of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Each worksheet contains a Spanish-language summary of the scene and two activities. The activities are either in Spanish and English or only in English.

The purpose of these materials is two-fold:

» To strengthen text comprehension of Romeo and Juliet for English Language Learners that are fluent in Spanish. This is achieved by reading Spanish-language summaries of each scene in the play.

» To further students’ acquisition of the English language through interaction to comprehensible input. After four decades in the field of second language acquisition, we know that language is not built up from practice, but from consistent and constant exposure to input. Input is indispensable to language acquisition (S. Krashen, B. VanPatten). The activities in this resource pack provide comprehensible, English-language input through the use of pairing, in which L1 (Spanish) is paired with L2. You will see this accomplished through a variety of strategies throughout the resource pack, always with the Spanish-language summary as a backdrop.

You are free to use these resources however you see fit. I support their use as a differentiated assignment, when classmates are working with the original text in English. The authentic (meaning, in its original form) play Romeo and Juliet is entirely incomprehensible to an English Language Learner, and so I support the use of simplified and/or translated texts so that ELL students can progress toward both content and linguistic standards.

Many thanks to Nelly Hughes, of Comprendes Mendez Spanish Shop, for revising the Spanish language summaries contained in this pack.