Rhetoric for English Language Learners: Language Features of Five Latter-day Saint Devotional Talks
Rhetoric for English Language Learners: Language Features of Five Latter-day Saint Devotional Talks

Summary/Abstract: Every year selected leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) speak to large audiences for regular devotional meetings at Brigham Young University, a private religious college in Provo, Utah. This study investigates the possibility that a rhetorical analysis of devotional speakers could be an effective way to observe typical language features in English public speaking that would be especially helpful for advanced English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students in improving their comprehension and expression skills. Using published transcripts and cassette tape recordings of these Latter-day Saint discourses, the analysis includes lexical, figurative, syntactic, schematic, tonal, and semantic aspects of each devotional speech. The results suggest that such religious discourses contain language details and rhetorical patterns in English that ESL students could learn to recognize, understand, and use persuasively.

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