A Lesson in Persuasion - The Speech

The website American Rhetoric – Top 100 Speeches provides us with audio and print for some of the most persuasive speeches in American history. Among those speeches there are some that have had universal impact, because they have inspired lives and brought civil liberties to all corners of the world.

As we browse the speeches we ask ourselves: Which one of the 100 speeches would make the most impact on a particular student or set of students we can think of, and why? What language elements would we guide this student or group to notice in this particular speech? What would the purpose be ... the setting ... the audience? The triumphant speech of the captain of the football team after the intercol game? The acceptance speech of the winner of Mr. Personality of the Year at your annual school pageant? Leading the school Monday morning assembly? The valedictory address?

We also think of objectives for language lessons to teach this brand of rhetoric, as we examine both the audio and print resources we have readily at hand.

Project Gutenberg and Bibliomania

There is no excuse for students and teachers complaining anymore about the inaccessibility or the cost of literature classic texts. Welcome to Project Gutenberg and Bibliomania. We have browsed these sites and here share our views of the impact they have made on us as teachers and readers.

The protocol for our comments is as follows: We browse the range of classics on either one or both of these two archival sites to see whether we can locate texts that we have studied, or texts that we teach. We access an audio book and listen to its quality, saying how we can use both audio and print in our language classroom.

Struggling Adolescent Readers

Although we were successful last year in many areas of our practice, we intend to experiment specifically with more strategies for improving the reading competence of our students. Struggling Adolescent Readers: A Collection of Teaching Strategies edited by David W. Moore, Donna E. Alvermann, and Kathleen A. Hinchman is a very useful compendium of tested and tried strategies. Sharing our understandings of the topics in this volume that mean most to us is our first preparation for implementing some of them. The protocol of our forum is described below.

First we give the title of the article we have read. Second, we identify the main ideas in the article, explaining the pedagogical need being addressed. Many of the articles decribe stages in the implementation of their intervention, so we outline these. Finally, although the articles in Struggling Adolescent Readers suggest that they target remedial needs, they speak to all of us, because the information they present is applicable to some student or students from Form 1 to Form 6 that we teach. Therefore, we tell how the article impacts our reflection on our classroom practice and our students' needs.