Yes ,Shakespeare might be an overkill- but not all literature.

It's all 'overkill' in China. Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, the whole bloody lot! Most ESL students couldn't even get to grips with Enid 'lashings of ginger beer' Blighton.

It's difficult enough to get them to write a grammatically correct sentence in the first place, without attempting to introduce different styles of sentence construction and the thought processes behind them.

An ex-colleague of mine tried to teach George Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language' to grade 11 students. No prizes for guessing how successful he was, lol.

Meanwhile, I spent an hour yesterday, (sorry, WASTED an hour), trying to explain to a Chinese-English teacher why we don't say something like: 'We can, shouldn't we?' or 'We won't, might we?'

She then went on to ask me if the following sentence is correct: 'So quickly did she finish her homework, that she was praised.'

Technically, it's not 'wrong', but it almost sounds 'poetic' rather than 'natural' and I'd bet all of Pigsy's houses that you'd NEVER hear a NES use that type of sentence construction. Teaching them Eng Lit? Not a chance, Flossy.