<p> Nativist language, expressed as opposition to foreigners, has been a part of American history since the country's founding. At various times, often during periods of recession and economic pressure, nativist movements have arisen with remarkable fervor, at times affecting the course of the nation's history. Most recently, the twenty years from 1990-2010 saw a significant increase both in the number and power of anti-immigration organizations. During this period, the contemporary minutemen, organizations of nativists focused on border security, came to prominence. Anti-immigrant pressure groups, whose purpose was to focus on specific aspects of immigration, became powerful. Nativist politicians found that rhetoric could successfully elevated their cause to prominence on the national stage. </p><p> This study uses principles of generic criticism to analyze the rhetoric of two contemporary Minutemen organizations and their founders, as well as three prominent nativist leaders. It seeks to determine whether there are common characteristics in the chosen examples of nativist rhetoric. Under such circumstances, the rhetoric would be classified as belonging to a particular genre, or type. The analysis reports that there are five common characteristics shared by the five rhetors: Appeals to rationality and positioning within the mainstream; predictions of threats to economic security and political stability; paranoid language; patriotic and constitutional imagery and alignment with law enforcement; and appeals for sympathy for victims. It continues by comparing the five commonalities with common rhetorical forms and concludes that all five align with the rhetorical type known as the jeremiad. Named for the biblical prophet Jeremiah, this type of rhetoric is marked by a call for a return to traditional values, predictions of disasters to come if the audience does not heed the warnings, and reassurance that the audience and the nation will be rewarded for their righteous behavior. The study also finds that contemporary nativist rhetoric can be classified as exhibiting the paranoid style of rhetoric. The study concludes with an enumeration of issues relating to rhetorical studies of nativism that arose during the research. These issues would be useful avenues of inquiry for other researchers intrigued by the subject.</p>

The method proposed by David Bleich in Readings and Feelings has been studied in a small group to determine if emotional involvement with literary works may be increased and, if so, what effect such increase would have on traditional literary competence. Results show that Bleich's method does increase emotional involvement with concurrent improvement in literary skills, particularly in the selection of more significant themes for student writing. Discussion of the method's application in regular classrooms is included.

A study of rhetorical practice in the design and interpretation of games, this dissertation draws on culture theory and ethnographic interviews to comprehend invention as a social act. Although only role-playing games written in English are considered, the approach taken to understand the structures of attention emergent in gaming is generalizable as a means of investigating the informal social and rhetorical aspects of other kinds of games. The textual and visual rhetorics of numerous games are examined as self-situating lessons for acquiring and focusing interest. The intrinsic gap between reading and following a rule is explored as a phenomenon mediated by rhetoric. Experienced players' reflections on styles and motives are translated into ratios in a grammar of rhetorical invention. Finally, the game designers are interviewed for their professional life histories relative to the development of particular games, and the matters they emphasize are read as configurations of cultural knowledge animated by personal rhetorical resources and heuristics.

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This research examined how sixth-grade students utilized evaluations and goals while revising their texts, to determine if those students who were identified as better writers also had more success when revising, and if specific types or configurations of operations lead to more successful revision. A coding system was developed to identify evaluations and goals according to the functions that they served during revision. Evaluations were categorized as either acceptance or rejection evaluations, depending on their judgment of the text. Goals were categorized as text strategy or guidance goals, depending on whether they instituted a specific strategy to counter a perceived problem in the text, or instituted a procedure or action that constituted management of the revision task. / Think-aloud protocols and drafts of compositions provided a trace of students' revision activity. Identification of evaluations and goals by the functions that they served during revision provided a method for monitoring the connection between the process students used in revising and the product (if any) that resulted. Revisions produced were categorized as surface or text-base, with both their accumulative and individual impact on the text assessed. The coding system identified all evaluations and goals, even those that did not result in text changes but that were associated with considerations and attempts. Therefore, all revising behaviors, including emerging skills, were acknowledged. / Results revealed that those students identified as better writers were not better revisors in terms of using evaluations or goals in a manner that resulted in the production of more sophisticated or more effective revisions. Students identified as low to high level writers all experienced various revision difficulties, as reflected by the absence of specific types of evaluations and/or goals that could have facilitated revision, yet were not used. Terminal revising was the common approach and involved reviewing a textual area only once, and setting a limited number of evaluations and goals to address a perceived problem. However, a sub-group of students who were identified as poorer writers did use an iterative revising strategy, which resulted in improved text quality. This strategy involved successive reviews of the text, resulting in the implementation of related multiple evaluations and goals addressing one textual area. / Educators can consider the revising strategies (i.e., terminal and iterative revising) and operations (i.e., functional evaluations and goals) specifically identified in this research to assess how students' revise and to determine what strategies and operations need to be encouraged to foster absent or underdeveloped revision skills. Collaborative student and teacher interactions designed to encourage the utilization of these specific strategies and operations have the potential to lead to more effective revising.

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This paper investigates errors in compositions written by junior and senior high school students. Two types of errors are specifically targeted, one relating to grammar in subject-verb agreement and another relating to the word class of prepositions. The aim of the present study is to focus on aspects which are of particular difficulty for the students, and to unveil underlying psycholinguistic mechanisms which affect the students’ acquisition process, for example, a potential influence of the mother tongue. The study is also expected to yield information about potential differences in error frequency and language construction between proficiency levels. The study is cross-sectional and includes altogether fifty-six samples collected from 7th and 9th grade at junior high school, and Year 1 and Year 3 at senior high school. Each group has produced fourteen compositions of free writing, and each text consists of approximately 200-300 words. The topic of the writing task was related to the supernatural and the head title was set as Do you believe in ghosts? A few taxonomies (James, 1998) and a method referred to as Error Analysis (Ellis, 1994), (both deriving from Second Language Acquisition research) are used to categorize, describe and explain error frequencies of certain error types. The results of the study show that the error frequency generally decreases from one expected proficiency level to another. The highest number of errors was found in 7th grade students’ writing, and the lowest in Year 3 students’ writing. Regardless of proficiency level, what is most troublesome for the students with subject-verb agreement is to master the 3rd person –s inflection. Prepositions, on the other hand, which account for a lower number of errors in the compositions compared to the number of subject-verb agreement errors, tend to be used erroneously when the students are confused about when and which a particular preposition should agree in a specific contextual meaning in English.

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No description available.