ABSTRACT
The studious ones developed a sense of alienation in a place where learning is not valued any more than marks are, whereas the greater majority tended to have little self-confidence. In post-revolution Tunisia, the process of educational reform is still underway. With absenteeism a normalized behavior, student attendance, rather than course content, has become the main indicator of professors’ competence. Notwithstanding the perfectly “readable, actable, dramatic” qualities of the modernized English translation of the classical play, the language barrier in the context of drama course is three times as problematic: students are non-native English, freshmen challenged by the poetic language of the play, especially when they tend to have a (very) low level of language competence, as their curt and broken English statements show when they manage to break the classroom silence.
