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Teaching Resources


Teaching Resources

Here’s a small collection of teaching resources created by members of the Converse team. More are coming soon…

Pilgrim Picker (interactive Flash resource). Match up Chaucer’s description of the Canterbury pilgrims with the medieval illustrations.

Chaucer’s postcards (interactive Flash resource). Experiment translating modern into middle English and send your message to a friend.

An introduction to Chaucer (word document). This brief history of Chaucer’s life is a good introduction to the significance of his poetry as well.

An introduction to Middle English (word document). This essay shows how English has changed over the past 1000 years, and introduces students to reading Middle English for themselves.

How to pronounce Middle English (word document). A brief guide with hints on how to pronounce Chaucer’s English.

A glossary of Middle English (word document)

Links and further reading (word document). Suggestions for web sites and books to follow up.

Useful Links

As always, there are some wonderful teaching resources on TeachIt – these can be used for introducing Chaucer from Year 7 up to 6th form. Search for Chaucer and you’ll find the resources.

This website has illustrations of all the pilgrims from a contemporary manuscript of the Canterbury Tales.

This website has brief sound clips in Middle English from the Tales.

Cambridge University Press sells CDs with Middle English recordings of various tales.