Eloquence

Classroom Activities

We will begin the unit with an introductory lesson designed to activate schema and access prior knowledge. Students will complete an Internet scavenger hunt that will form the basis for an introductory discussion of the novel. The scavenger hunt will also include questions that lead to building background knowledge in order to form a context in which to frame the introduction of rhetoric. I will have highlighted copies of chapter one of Lord of the Flies to use as scripts that will be performed as Readers' Theater, stopping frequently to check for understanding, while modeling highlighting and annotating techniques that students will continue to do independently throughout the text. This process of Readers' Theater and textual interaction will take place throughout our reading of the novel and will be supported by use of the dialectical journal.

Early in the unit, students will be introduced to the rhetorical appeals and begin to track character dialogue, annotating which appeals characters use most consistently. As more of the reading and textual interaction begins to take place at home, class time will become a forum for discussion of the novel and introduction of the rhetorical appeals and the Five Canons of Rhetoric.

As the unit progresses, students will have an opportunity to conduct close readings of the transcripts of speeches by Hitler, Chamberlain, and Roosevelt, applying their highlighting and annotating skills to these texts, and then using SOAPSTone exercises to analyze the authors' use of rhetoric. Then by viewing film footage of the speeches, we will consider the efficacy of the speakers and their embodiment of the Five Canons of Rhetoric and Monroe's Motivated Sequence.

Throughout the unit we will be discussing Lord of the Flies and the similarities between the speech communities that evolve in the novel and the rhetoric employed in the political speeches that we study.

As a final unit project, students will synthesize their understanding of the novel and their study of rhetoric in order to craft and deliver a two-minute oration in the persona of Ralph, Piggy, or Jack, as the character presents a persuasive speech to the rest of the boys on the island. These orations will be memorized and delivered in class, and they will be evaluated using rubrics to assess their mastery of The Five Canons of Rhetoric and Monroe's Motivated Sequence.