Eloquence

Objectives

California has adopted the Common Core State Standards and my district is busily restructuring and rewriting curricula to address the new expectations for teaching and learning. Despite assurance to the contrary, in the English classes of my district the increased emphasis on providing students with strategies to read nonfiction has largely translated into the removal of extended works of fiction. Literature-based writing courses have given way to Expository Reading and Writing for College courses made up of prescribed lessons based on state-selected nonfiction texts. Many of the strategies and skills learned through the ERWC curriculum are valuable and engaging to students, and there is definitely room for them in the English curriculum, but a central objective of this unit is to maintain the novel as the core text and to supplement it with tracts of historical political speeches in a manner that still addresses the core standards. It is my hope that this approach will serve as a model for preserving fiction while still meeting the demands of the new standards.

Not only does this unit of study support the Common Core by dramatically shifting the learning through an emphasis on non-fiction reading, it also incorporates listening and speaking, and cross-curricular project-based assessment.

Specifically and intentionally, the focused instruction of this unit will help prepare my sophomore English 2 Honors students for the rigors of English 3AP. At the same time, it supports the teaching and learning within the World History AP course that most of my students are taking concurrently.

Through the activities of this unit, students will develop skills to integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse media or formats and assess the credibility and accuracy of each source. ⁶ They will do this be viewing and analyzing videos of historical speeches, as well as reading and analyzing the texts of these and other speeches. We will evaluate both text and performance, critiquing each of the Five Canons of Rhetoric: Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory and Delivery (IASMAD). Students will identify the application and effectiveness of Monroe's Motivated Sequence: Attention, Need, Satisfaction, Visualization, Action (ANSVA). Also, students will be able to identify and understand the strategic efficacy of an author's use of ethos pathos, and logos.

Additionally, the unit will teach students to evaluate a speaker's point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric, while identifying any fallacious reasoning or exaggerated or distorted evidence. ⁷ To accomplish this, the Readers' Theater technique will be applied to selected chapters of the Lord of the Flies text. Afterwards, students will apply their understanding of SOAPSTone (Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Situation, and Tone) to analyze the effectiveness of character speech within the novel. They will then apply this same consideration to political speeches by Hitler, Roosevelt, and Chamberlain.

Another unit objective will be to provide students with the content knowledge and skills necessary to present information, findings, and supporting evidence clearly, concisely, and logically such that listeners can follow an author's line of reasoning, evaluating whether or not the organization, development, substance, and style are appropriate to purpose, audience, and task. ⁸ This learning will be evidenced by applying their understanding of character, plot, and theme, in order to craft a persuasive speech in the persona of one the principal characters from Lord of the Flies, taking into consideration Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery (IASMAD), as well as Arrangement, Need, Satisfaction, Visualization, and Action (ANSVA).

Finally, students will practice adapting speech to a variety of contexts and tasks, demonstrating command of formal English when indicated or appropriate. ⁹ They will demonstrate their mastery of this objective as each student delivers an oration employing appropriate rhetorical strategies, as well as IASMAD and ANSVA.