Activity 01
Role Play: The Expert Panel
Assign students different personas (e.g., a scientist, a local resident, a politician) to argue for a community project. Students must use specific linguistic markers to establish their unique authority before the class votes on who sounded most credible.
How does a speaker construct a persona to gain the trust of a skeptical audience?
Facilitation TipFor the Expert Panel, assign roles like moderator, expert, and skeptic to ensure every student engages with ethos construction in real time.
What to look forProvide students with a short transcript of a speech. Ask them to identify two specific linguistic choices the speaker made to establish credibility and explain how each choice contributes to their ethos.
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Activity 02
Think-Pair-Share: Credibility Audit
Students analyze a short speech transcript individually to highlight words that build trust. They then compare findings with a partner to categorize these words into 'expertise', 'shared values', or 'reliability' before sharing with the class.
In what ways do word choices reflect the underlying values of a persuasive text?
Facilitation TipDuring the Credibility Audit, provide a graphic organizer to help students map linguistic choices to moments in the text.
What to look forPose the question: 'How might a speaker adapt their persona and language to persuade a group of teenagers versus a group of senior citizens?' Facilitate a class discussion, encouraging students to provide specific examples of word choice and tone.
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Activity 03
Stations Rotation: Persona Shifts
Set up stations with the same message written in different tones (e.g., clinical, passionate, folksy). Groups move between stations to identify which linguistic choices create each persona and discuss which audience would find each most believable.
How can the manipulation of tone shift the power dynamic between speaker and listener?
Facilitation TipIn Station Rotation, supply short excerpts from different speakers so students can compare how persona shifts with each passage.
What to look forPresent students with a short video clip of a public figure. Ask them to write down three adjectives that describe the speaker's persona and one piece of evidence (a specific phrase or action) that supports their choice.
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Generate Complete Lesson→A few notes on teaching this unit
Experienced teachers approach this topic by modeling close reading of transcripts, not just speeches. They emphasize that ethos is built through repetition, word choice, and tone, not just titles or fame. Avoid focusing solely on rhetorical questions or dramatic delivery; instead, highlight the quiet, deliberate choices that make a speaker seem trustworthy.
Successful learning looks like students identifying specific linguistic choices that build ethos and explaining their effect on an audience. They should also adapt their own language to shifts in persona and audience, showing they understand ethos as a dynamic tool, not a fixed trait.
Watch Out for These Misconceptions
During Role Play: The Expert Panel, students may assume ethos comes from the role rather than the language used.
Use a transcript of a real expert panel discussion. After the role play, have students highlight linguistic choices in their scripts that built or undermined credibility, comparing their performance to the original.
During Think-Pair-Share: Credibility Audit, students might think credibility is established once and then forgotten.
Provide a speech transcript with clear transition points. Students should mark where the speaker reinforces or loses ethos, using the transcript to trace how credibility fluctuates throughout.
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