Due:
- Interview dates and sample texts (you can be quite firm with
dates on this day, but some students may need to collect samples
from faculty members they've yet to interview. For those situations,
have the groups set new deadlines).
Goals:
- To discuss interviewing and Rhetorical Analysis.
Assignment:
- Interviews and Rhetorical Analyses for next time.
Setup Needs:
- Handouts on Interview Assignment, Rhetorical Analysis, and
any other Unit III materials (assignment sheet for the paper and
presentation, etc.).
Sequence:
- Start out with the following DAILY:
The first task in exploring language in your own academic/professional
field is finding out what you want and need to know about that field.
Spend a few minutes brainstorming. Based on the goals of the
assignment, what do you need to find out about writing and language in
your field in the three areas you'll explore (class assignments,
academic writing, and workplace writing)?
While your students are working on the DAILY, make a three-column
chart on the board or an overhead:
Classroom Academic (professor) Workplace
Have your students come together, and briefly reiterate the interview
assignment (perhaps have your students read the assignment sheet)
and some of the ideas about interviewing they learned during the
arguing unit. Be sure to stress courtesy and promptness in these
interviews. They'll need to start making phone calls right away
so they can set up the interviews in time, and there are a lot
of CO150 classes doing this assignment.
- Once you've gone over the assignment, have your students generate
a master list of "things we need to know," based on
the dailies, on the board. Let them know that they can use these
to generate their own specific interview questions.
- Then, move on to an explanation of the rhetorical analysis.
Luckily, this should be easy since you've talked about language
analysis all along: essentially, the rhetorical analysis is the
same thing as the general analyses your students did in Unit I
and the audience analyses they did in Unit II. The difference
is that this one is more detailed and geared toward finding specific
information about language in their own fields.
- Go over the actual analysis sheet with your class.
- Have your students practice analyzing texts with the following
activity:
- First, break your students into groups according to the area
of their field their groups have assigned them to cover (everyone
covering classroom assignments should be in one group, academics
in another, etc.). If the groups get too large, cut them in half.
- Hand out copies of sample texts to each group according to
their respective areas of inquiry, and have the groups complete
a rhetorical analysis of their samples.
- Finally, bring the class back together and discuss their analyses.
How were they useful? What questions/difficulties came up?
- If you have any time remaining, have your students break into
their groups and spend the rest of the time generating specific
interview questions for each area of the discipline they're exploring
(you might also suggest that they help each other figure out who
to start calling for interviews).