Eloquence

Rationale

As a French teacher, I am responsible for teaching not just the mechanics of the language, but also how to put them into action, how to speak the words and breathe life into them. Students, especially at the middle school level of instruction, often struggle with the process of speaking fluently. They want to say more than they can, hunger in fact to express themselves better, more fully, and they soon become preoccupied with the lack. This results in speech that is often stilted, labored, and choppy, incomplete yet brimming with uncertainty

In this unit, I seek to explore and indeed exploit the elements of rhetoric, those tools used in effective and persuasive speaking and writing, to open up a new pathway to fluency for our students, both in prepared and spontaneous communication. With these tools, they will not only learn to inject more style and voice into their writing and speaking, but in so doing, will in fact hasten to persuade the listener or reader of their linguistic facility. In the act of convincing others, they will without doubt start to convince themselves. And this, of course, is where the magic happens for our kids.

This unit is organized around the five rhetorical canons (Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery) and the three modes of persuasion (Pathos, Logos, and Ethos) that will help students go deeper with their writing and speaking by not just absentmindedly laying down language on a page or carelessly spitting it out into the ether, but actually looking to get (albeit on a fairly simple level) purposeful and persuasive in their language usage.

To be clear, this is not a unit on speech writing or public speaking; the persuasion done here is neither outright nor prepared. Instead, we will employ the tools one would use in such endeavors to improve the quality of our students' communication experiences. By supporting opportunities for our students to inject more emotion (Pathos), argument or reason (Logos), and character (Ethos) into their writing and speaking, and to conceive of that work around the canons of rhetoric, we will outfit them with the tools and skills necessary to persuade themselves and each other, and through that everyone else, that they can speak French comfortably, and that they are making sure progress on that often elusive path to fluency.

This will provide a framework for types of language and techniques to use for enriching writing and speaking. Instead of just saying "Add more," or "Take it further," which can be vague and confusing for students, now we can guide them based on their strengths and interests down paths of how they can, a little more specifically, "add more" or "take it further." This framework can be applied to interrelated written and oral tasks, and it will provide a pool of options for enriching spontaneous communication as well, in the form of unprepared prompted conversations and regular classroom interactions.

There will be here an interplay between the spoken and written word, as well as between the spontaneous and the prepared. Although the ultimate goal is to employ these

tools in spontaneous speech, I find that the best way to equip students with these skills is to practice them explicitly and repeatedly, and to use writing to cement them into a foundational knowledge base.

This unit is geared toward 7 ^th and 8 ^th grade world language classes, which in my district combine to the equivalent of the 9th grade year-long course. It is written for French in particular; however it may be easily modified across languages and grade levels.