CRITIQUE PAPER ON RHETORIC STRATEGY

IN CLASSROOM DISCUSSION

ENGL 312
(TEACHING ENGLISH IN PRIMARY GRADES THROUGH LITERATURE)
S.Y. 2020 – 2021 (1ST SEMESTER)

Submitted by:
VALDEMOZA, SHENA MAE N.
zeeyhanamla@gmail.com
INTRODUCTION
Persuasive speaking is needed in a wide range of situations; from arguing with a
colleague, to haggling down a price, to performing a speech, or to creating discussions
in a classroom setting. Rhetoric is the key to developing this skill. To develop rhetoric as
your pedagogy in teaching, you need to go through its five canons; (1) The process of
developing an argument by picking effective content and sort through everything you
could say and decide what should be included or excluded; (2) Once you have
determined the content, you must organize and order your speech to create the most
impact, such as thinking about how long each section should be and what should follow
on from one point, (3) then, deciding how to present your chosen arguments, including
thinking tactically about how your audience will respond to your word choices. (4)
Memorizing your speech, (5) then the last is delivery which includes your projection,
gestures, eye contact, pronunciation, tone and pace.

For rhetoric discussions to be successful, you need to develop three appeals

according to Aristotle: ethos, logos, and pathos. They are modes of persuasion used to
convince an audience. Ethos is your credibility and character. Pathos is the emotional
bond with your listeners. Logos is the logical and rational argument.

The rhetoric of teaching applied in classroom discussion involves certain

methods for organizing presentations, building credibility with the audience, and making
messages more entertaining, informative, and persuasive. Intuitively, there are effective
ways for putting together messages to get others to agree with you. Putting it into
teaching strategy, the rhetor (teacher) (1) always gives question to provoke the
students’ critical thinking in each learning activity, (2) uses various learning methods, (3)
gives the task and the feedback, (4) gives chance to the students to use more
language, and (5) and gives the claim to the students to give the language product in
the form of students’ ability and creativity in using the language, for instance the paper,
article, popular writing, and many others. The language characteristics used by the
students in the learning process is influenced by the learning model chosen and used
by the rhetor and also the social background owned by the students.

CRITIQUE

While rhetoric approach in teaching is for the audience (students) to foster critical
thinking thereby enhancing or strengthening the core of classroom discussions it could
also lead into creating falsified informations and rigorous manipulation of facts. Critical
thinkers who have mastered the art of persuasion might deviate facts for his personal
motive. In the class, the rhetor (teacher) might mislead his audience to some
information in his attempt to persuade the class to agree in his very idea.
 On the other hand, the rhetoric strategy on teaching enhances the capacity of the
rhetor and the audience to evaluate skillfully and fairly the quality of evidence about the
concepts being discussed and detect error, hypocrisy, manipulation, dissembling, and
bias." Unfortunately, presented with something like a speech from their favored others,
students will be hard-pressed to find error, hypocrisy, or bias. Critical reasoning will not
help them to “unpack” the text, as we say, though it may help when they are called upon
to construct a rigorous argument.

Teaching a class too much in this mode produces an unhappily smug series of
field trips through “our stupid popular culture,” “our stupid political landscape,” and so
on, along with the depressing feeling that nobody, the instructor included, will follow
through in practice on the overwhelmingly negative evaluations of culture that the
“critical thinking” method produces.

Furthermore, the rhetorical approach seemed to resolve the increasingly tense

problem of what students ought to be reading or otherwise studying. There were visual
and auditory rhetorics earning the attention of scholars in every field; in fact, anything
that had an audience apparently had a rhetoric, so you could finally teach pop culture
alongside of canonical literature without drearily insisting that pop culture was lies,
damn lies, and false advertising. You could seamlessly blend new media into traditional
writing curriculums, which was good since students had less stomach for reading, less
training in it, and more of an appetite for mixed media or short pieces. Overall, the
rhetorical approach tended to produce surprisingly positive evaluations of, well, just
about everything, because rhetoric became a pleasure in and of itself.

In reality, however, teachers tended to fall back on dogma whenever they tried to
perform a rhetorical critique of politically successful discourse. For example, if you
wanted to prove that Rodrigo Duterte has pacified and controlled illegal drugs in the
Philippines from spreading, you had to invoke your own personal theory that out there,
in the real world transcends discourse, things weren’t so “black and white.” Or, in a
different example, you might have to just announce that most scientists believe in
evolution or global warming, thus giving your students the “right answer” independent of
audience or Aristotle’s categories of appeals. Students will, of course, dutifully
reproduce this kind of information in the essays they submit, but the frame created by
the focus on rhetoric makes such information look like bias. Hanging over every
discussion is the idea that all perspectives contain bias, or the equivalent idea that
everyone has a valid belief. This relativism is inherent to rhetoric itself, when it is
isolated as a field of study. It is something that Aristotle narrowly avoided by simply
announcing that his essentially technical discourses on rhetoric were subordinate to
truth, and that only truthful orators could use rhetoric rightfully. His important corollary
has been lost in the contemporary revival of ethos, pathos, and logos. If everyone is
right, or everyone is biased, then alliances, not truths, are the highest values.
 Most people have, within certain familiar realms, a very sophisticated, intuitive
understanding of rhetorical strategy. Teenagers know how to shift from one vocabulary
to another, depending on audience, and sound completely different in their essays than
they do in casual conversation or on IM programs. They have different ways of speaking
to parents and friends, and they work hard on crafting online and offline persona that
others will find appealing. One of the gratifying things about teaching rhetoric is that
students “get it” right away, because it relates to certain fundamental social skills. Thus,
when a class works together on a rhetorical analysis, students often manage to rapidly
produce useful observations. This is especially true when they are dealing with
something comfortable, like a scene from a movie.

CONCLUSIONS

By thoroughly analyzing the rhetorical approach applied in a classroom

discussion, we have concluded that such approach will only become effective when the
rhetors (teachers) themselves are equipped with the knowledge towards the subject
matter or have mastered the concept of that certain topic. Strategizing on rhetoric could
either elicit higher learning or jeopardize it when the methods applied by the rhetor are
not done carefully. Even so, if the rhetoric approach is taken properly with the utmost
guidance , it will be very good to aid the audience (student) in the learning process. It
could awaken their metacognitive ability, their creative and critical thinking, and could
provide students the horizon they need to excel as writers, regardless of what kind of
writing they eventually do. The field of rhetoric ought to remain a discipline in its own
right, instead of becoming simply another word for using language, and as a discipline it
is not broad enough to cover all the moments of aesthetic discovery and delight that
initiate students into the writer’s world. That kind of mixed curriculum in today’s
academic environment requires immense dedication on the part of students, and it
means leaving enough room in student schedules so that they can puzzle over long and
unfamiliar texts. Out of discussions of character and circumstance, real conversations
about situational ethics and diverse viewpoints can take place, on a far more
sophisticated level than discussions of rhetorical efficacy that boil down to relativism.
Society can be judged complexly; it does not need to automatically be scolded in the
name of “critical reasoning,” or praised because it runs on rhetoric.

Finally, the classroom can be a place where a felt response to imaginary

circumstances prepares students for a world in which they will frequently have to make
ethical decisions whose implications go far beyond anything they can directly see or
experience. Rhetoric works well in many situations, such as, in business presentations,
lectures etc. So rhetoric is a good tool but, like any other tools, it's up to you how to use
it effectively.