A Symbolic Action Critique of New Oriental Teacher Language
of, communicating and transmitting information and knowledge in the teaching
process, teacher language plays a vital role. In the daily communication with students,
teachers can use some rhetorical strategies to influence students and persuade them to
build good learning behaviors. With its success, the New Oriental has become a
popular subject in the academic community and has been approached from a wide
range of disciplines. Scholars in different fields study it from different perspectives.
However, the New Oriental, as one of the most popular language training
organizations, is paid less attention than it deserves at the discourse level. Almost no
one studies the New Oriental from the linguistic perspective, not to mention from the
rhetorical aspect. In this thesis, what we focus on is the rhetorical operation of the
New Oriental’s discourse, which is the crucial step for winning the trust of students,
parents, and investors. To the best of my knowledge, the symbolic action analysis of
the New Oriental’s discourse is almost a virgin land at home and abroad. Therefore,
we try to critique here the New Oriental’s discourse through a rhetorical lens. It is
worth mentioning that this analysis touches upon not only the New Oriental’s
discourse in the classroom teaching, but also the New Orientals’ speeches and the
New Oriental’s publicity, and thus intend to provide a brand-new perspective—a
rhetorical one —for analyzing the New Oriental’s discourse.
In consideration of theoretical framework, we find that even though the theories
of new rhetoric represented by Burke and Aristotle’s classical rhetoric have many
similarities, almost none combine them and explain their relationship. As the
representative of the classical rhetoric, Aristotle holds that rhetoric is “the faculty of
observing in any given case the available means of persuasion” (1954: 24). For him,
the key point of classical rhetoric is persuasion. By emphasizing that “you persuade a
man only in so far as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order,
image, attitude, idea, identify your ways with his” (1969: 55), Burke expresses the
importance of identification, the key term of new rhetoric. It can be seen that
persuasion and identification are not two conflicted concepts. Besides, we deem that
“identification” and “enthymeme” may overlap in the operation of persuasion. The
process of enthymeme is the process of identifying, during which artistic proofs take
effect throughout. Therefore, in this thesis, we aim at combining theories between
Burke’s and Aristotle’s to establish a rhetorical operating device for a better analysis
of the New Oriental’s discourse. Additionally, by virtue of five types of identification
and pentadic analysis, rhetorical analysis is proved to be an effective tool for our
better understanding of natures of many different phenomena. Therefore, critiquing
the New Oriental’s discourse through a rhetorical lens is supposed to be useful for us
to get a better understanding of the success of the New Oriental and gain some
enlightenment from its success.
1.2 General Purpose of the Study
The general purpose of the study is to analyze how the New Oriental’s discourse
operates in persuasion from a rhetorical angle and by critiquing the New Oriental’s
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