In my college composition teaching, I find that many of the texts we examine speak more to one group of students than another. In particular, I rarely find texts that speak to African and other Black students. This is one of the reasons that I found participating in the panel “Teaching English Using Historic Speeches by People of Color” to be one of the most useful experiences I had at TESOL this year. The panel, which was sponsored by the independent forum Black English Language Professionals and Friends (BELPaF), comprised four presentations. Mabel Asante (Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York) focused on excerpts from the speeches of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah. I, Jennifer Mott-Smith, (Towson University, Maryland), presented U.S. actor and social activist Ossie Davis’ (1973) speech entitled The English Language is my Enemy. Mary Romney (University of Connecticut, Storrs) focused on interviews and speeches by Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai. And Milcah Ochieng (Madison Area Technical College, Wisconsin) used excerpts from Barack Obama’s (2009) U.S.-Muslim relations speech. Issues covered by the panelists included colonization, representation, and race relations, as well as the celebration of impressive Black historical figures.

As a genre, speeches cross the boundary between writing and speech; they demonstrate appropriate spoken behavior in formal settings, and they are a little-used register in language education materials. Teaching speeches is relevant to teachers of second language writing (SLW), particularly those working in higher education, in at least two ways. First, teaching speeches can encourage critical thinking and lead to sophisticated writing assignments. Second, speeches can be analyzed as a form of rhetoric. After discussing how the panel presentations met these objectives, I go on to discuss how one presentation might be adapted to do so.

ENCOURAGING CRITICAL THINKING AND DEVELOPING WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTS

Most of the panelists encouraged critical thinking and introduced writing assignments based on the speeches. Here, I discuss only two. Dr. Asante drew on Nkrumah’s 1960 United Nations speech addressing the recent independence and continuing colonization of countries in Africa (in Obeng, 1997) and his 1964 remarks on the writing of the Encyclopedia Africana (Nkrumah, n.d.). Asante used prereading questions to stimulate the students’ thinking. For the UN address, she asked:

1. What is a colony?
2. What countries do you know that were colonized?
3. What are some of the responsibilities of the UN?

For the Encyclopedia address, the questions included the following:

1. What is an encyclopedia?
2. Have you used an encyclopedia before? What for?
3. In your opinion, what qualifications should encyclopedia writers have?

After the students read the speeches, Asante asked them to use their knowledge gained from the texts and from personal experience to address more sophisticated questions, including the following:

1. Why do groups of people fight for political autonomy?
2. Do you agree with Nkrumah that only scholars of African descent should contribute to the encyclopedia?

Both sequences of activities discussed by Asante also had research components. For the first sequence, she asked students to find the African countries that were admitted to the United Nations in 1960. For the second, she instructed them to write down a question about an African country and then use the Encyclopedia Africana to answer it. These research assignments seemed particularly appealing because they were short and allowed for the teaching of discrete research skills.

In my presentation, I also focused on critical thinking and writing skills. The Davis speech provided an opportunity for students to think deeply about the connections between language, race, and schooling; to consider the sociopolitics of English; and to reflect on common interests between Black English language learners and African Americans. I gave a number of prereading questions, including the following:

1. What words do you feel have more power in your home language than in English?
2. Have you ever reacted physically to someone using a dirty word?
3. List all the words you can think of that refer to the idea of “Black.” Also, list the words that you know that refer to Black people, White people, and members of your own racial or ethnic group(s).

Then, I moved the students to responding to more sophisticated questions in writing after reading and discussing the speech. Writing questions included the following:

1. Davis tells us that there are 44 positive synonyms for “Whiteness” and 60 negative ones for “Blackness.” Do you think that the negativity associated with Blackness comes from racism or somewhere else? Does it matter?
2. Write your own definition of racism and explain how it differs from that of Davis.
3. Davis says, “Let us pursue truth though it hurts, though it makes us bleed” (p. 76). What truth is he referring to? Why would it hurt us? Discuss a truth that you know from your own experience that hurts.

Though writing teachers have long recognized the interrelation of teaching writing and reading, with these units, we also drew on a less well-recognized but equally fertile relation of writing and speaking.

SPEECHES AS A FORM OF RHETORIC

Providing numerous online resources for analysis of Obama’s U.S.-Muslim relations speech, Dr. Ochieng focused her teaching on analyzing effective oral argumentation. Ochieng began by identifying the purposes of the speech, and then presented an analysis of the seven main sources of tension covered (violent extremism, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nuclear arms, democracy and religious freedom, women’s rights, and economic opportunity). She went on to present an analysis of Obama’s use of pathos to establish credibility with his audience, including his use of Arabic, references to the Qu’ran, use of his full name (Hussein), and his construction of himself as “a different kind of American” through the words “a U.S. president and an African American.”

Ochieng suggested a variety of follow-up activities that focused the students on the speech as a rhetorical form:

1. Identify and analyze persuasive techniques in President Obama’s speech.
2. Identify President Obama’s argument and the evidence he uses to support it.
3. Identify transitions in the speech; then, write your own speech using these transitions.

In my use of Davis’ speech, I also encouraged students to take a rhetorical approach to the speech. Students considered contextual questions such as

1. Where is Davis giving this speech?
2. What is the purpose of the gathering?
3. What race of people is Davis talking to?
4. Were you surprised that Davis says he has stage fright? What reason does he give for it? Do you think race plays into it? What is the effect of his telling us this?

I also encouraged students to examine the use of repetition as a persuasive strategy, asking:

Davis does not group his solutions together under one heading, but rather, repeats the ideas under several headings. How does this repetitive organizing structure promote his point?

Then, I developed a class discussion comparing Davis’ structure with structures we had already seen in class:

How might the structure be different if Davis had written the speech as an essay for this class?

By focusing on the speeches’ rhetorical aspects, we not only practiced the skills of rhetorical analysis but also identified similarities and differences between speeches and writing, and modeled successful speech-writing techniques.

ADAPTING A SPEECH UNIT FOR WRITING

Focused on the development of listening and speaking skills, Romney’s unit perhaps would require the most adaptation for a writing class. It opened with two engaging activities that introduced Maathai through her winning of the Nobel Peace Prize. The first presented a list of people and asked, “What do all these people have in common?” The list included Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, Muhammad Yunus, Al Gore, Martin Luther King, Jr., Wangari Maathai, Nelson Mandela, Rigoberta Menchú, Barack Obama, Desmond Tutu, Oscar Arias Sánchez, and Mother Teresa. Audience members enjoyed the challenge, and Romney happily filled in details of the lives that were missing from our knowledge stores. The second activity was a true/false quiz including the following items:

1. Only six African men and two African women have received the Nobel Peace Prize since it was first awarded in 1901 (F -- Maathai was the only African woman).
2. The first Nobel Peace Prize for environment was won by Al Gore (F – He was preceded by Maathai).
3. One woman is responsible for planting over 40 million trees (T -- It was Maathai).
4. No woman in East or Central Africa had ever received a PhD before the 1970s (T -- Maathai was the first in 1971).

Romney filled in the background of Maathai’s life by providing a reading (The Green Belt Movement, n.d.). She demonstrated her use of Maathai’s (n.d.) reading of the story “The Hummingbird,”which is a fable with animal actors and is accessible to students from many cultures. Romney invited the audience to listen for Maathai’s rhythm and pauses, as she does with her students. Then, she stopped the story and demonstrated how she instructs students to practice speaking by generating their own story endings.

In a writing class, this unit could be adapted in a number of ways. Because Maathai is a native Kenyan, Romney’s use of her beautiful speech as a model in a speaking class is unusual. Thus, the issue of accent could be discussed in class, and students could write about their own goals or models for their speech. Students could also write rather than speak their endings to the story, and they could extend the task by applying the metaphor of the story to, for example, the life of Maathai. Another adaptation would be to have students do a research project on Maathai, the Nobel Peace Prize, or a related topic.

CONCLUSION

This panel was invigorating because it introduced teaching materials that raise some of the most pressing issues of our times. In my classroom, I have found that using materials that raise these issues draws out and promotes the achievement of my African students. Moreover, as a writing teacher, focusing on speeches as a genre provides fodder for the development of skills in critical thinking, writing, and rhetorical analysis. It may also be helpful for students who need to learn to give speeches to realize that the genre shares aspects of writing and that preparation of a successful speech is not unlike producing a written text.

REFERENCES

Davis, O. (1973). The English language is my enemy. In R. H. Bentley & S. D. Crawford, (Eds.), Black Language Reader(pp. 71-77). Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman.

Jennifer Mott-Smith is assistant professor of English and ESOL coordinator at Towson University in Towson, Maryland, USA. She has taught SLW at the college level for over 20 years. Her current research interests include Chinese students’ adaptations to U.S. college classrooms and the standardized testing of English language learners.