In particular, the Question 2 passage the past two years have been speeches with specific contextual situations (Chavez on Martin Luther King and Thatcher on Reagan). In order to do well in their analysis, students needed to consider how the situation impacted the author's rhetorical moves.
While vital to understanding, this is also something that students really struggle with, in my experience.
I've often wondered why they find this so difficult. To me it seems so simple: the context is that which surrounds. The time and place the speech is given, audience prior experience and mood, speaker background and reputation. For me, context is a deep and exciting exploration into background information. But students seem to balk at the mere word, I suppose because it's an abstract concept.
So I developed a lesson that helps them dig deeply into context and explore how those contexts impact the text.
I begin with two texts that have similar but not identical contexts. The two that I love for this activity are Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Pearl Harbor Address and George W. Bush's 9/11 Address. I like the clear similarities (both presidents, both addressing attacks on home soil) and also the clear differences (very different circumstances of attacks, different audiences who had different knowledge of the events).
First, I ask my students to read them once through to get the gist. They highlight anything they notice, and we clarify each speaker's purpose using vivid verbs, but we don't talk much about the speech just yet.
Next, we spend a good long time brainstorming as much as we can about each speaker, audience, and subject. I use this graphic organizer, and this year I actually had them fill it out in google-docs, which saved us the step of having to move small group-to-class brainstorm. We brainstorm as much as we possibly know about each of the three parts of the triangle (and we ignore the "analysis" section of the chart for now). It's okay if some of the points being brainstormed are not relevant to this particular speech. For example, the fact that FDR was in a wheelchair does not necessarily have a rhetorical impact on this speech, but it's part of the context of him as a speaker, so I let my students include it on the brainstorm anyhow.
After we feel like we've got a really in-depth understanding of the elements of context, we go back to the speeches. I usually have them split up, and now we talk more in depth about each author's choices; I do this early in the year, so this is a pretty bare-bones "what do you notice?" conversation, but it's our first step towards analysis.
For example, students might notice that FDR spends most of the beginning of his speech outlining exactly what happened, where, and by whom. They notice his repeated use of "Last night, the Japanese..." And that leads to a conversation: Why did he do that? What did he know about his context that caused him to start out with that? Students usually recognize that FDR's audience needed the details of the attack because most of them hadn't personally witnessed it. They might say that his primary audience was reluctant to enter the war, so they needed mounds of hard evidence to persuade them of its necessity.
On the contrary, students notice that Bush doesn't spend as much time describing the attacks, because by the time he delivered this address, most of his audience had seen them happen on television. They notice that Bush's tone is more comforting, and more of an attempt to bolster the spirit of the American people. These are all choices that are informed by Bush's understanding of the subject and his audience.
We will usually spend two 75 minute blocks on this activity. After we're done with this conversation, I will ask my students to write a paragraph describing the relevant elements of context, and a very simple attempt at an analysis paragraph (I usually ask them to identify the author's purpose and then connect one element of context to one choice that the speaker made: "Because ____ knew _____, he chose to ______").
The next class period, I will put some of their paragraphs up on the doc cam so we can talk about which paragraphs are on target and which ones are weaker at showing logical connections between context and choices.
This has worked well for me. I really love it because inevitably we'll get back to context later in the year and they'll go back to brainstorming only a few details for each element of the triangle. They say "I don't know, what's context again?" And I can always refer them right back to their chart from this lesson so they can be reminded of the depth at which context can be considered.
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