scholarly journals Investigating pragma-rhetorical strategies utilized by American commencement speakers to motivate graduates for managing future opportunities and challenges

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (S1) ◽  
pp. 342-362
Author(s):  
Ahmed Sahib Mubarak ◽  
Kadhim Ketab Rhaif

Motivating emotions is a critical factor in empowering students to manage the troubles they might face. Educational organizations pay great efforts to employ all the available means that can motivate their students for better learning from early stages until universities or institutes levels. The administrations of some universities and institutes, especially in the United States of America, do not stop there and pay more attention on motivating their students at the graduation parties on how to manage future businesses and challenges. This study explores how commencement speakers utilize success stories pragma-rhetorically to motivate the graduates to behave wisely to take future decisions. It investigates the pragmatic-rhetorical strategies in the motivational storytelling that is delivered within commencement speeches at American universities and institutes. It aims to recognize and analyze these strategies that commencement speakers employ as strategic strategies in presenting their stories to achieve their motivational purposes.  More specifically, it explores how speech acts, rhetorical tropes, conversational implicatures, and rhetorical appeals are used and distributed in the storytelling discourse. To this end, the researchers selected ten commencement speeches delivered by American commencement speaker.

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Jie Hu ◽  
Kezheng Chen ◽  
Dongfang Liu

We empirically investigated Chinese university faculty members' visiting experience and professional growth in American universities. The major data source was qualitative semistructured interviews with 30 Chinese faculty members in the arts, engineering, natural sciences, and social sciences disciplines. The results showed that, despite challenges in preparation, language, and different academic cultures, Chinese visiting scholars were capable of navigating their host programs and achieving professional growth as they moved from peripheral to central participation in their academic community. We also critically discussed how Chinese visiting scholars' academic experience in the United States can be improved, and cast light on the globalization of higher education.


Publications ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Mauro G. Carta ◽  
Matthias C. Angermeyer ◽  
Silvano Tagliagambe

The purpose is to verify trends of scientific production from 2010 to 2020, considering the best universities of the United States, China, the European Union (EU), and private companies. The top 30 universities in 2020 in China, the EU, and the US and private companies were selected from the SCImago institutions ranking (SIR). The positions in 2020, 2015, and 2010 in SIR and three sub-indicators were analyzed by means of non-parametric statistics, taking into consideration the effect of time and group on rankings. American and European Union universities have lost positions to Chinese universities and even more to private companies, which have improved. In 2020, private companies have surpassed all other groups considering Innovation as a sub-indicator. The loss of leadership of European and partly American universities mainly concerns research linked to the production of patents. This can lead to future risks of monopoly that may elude public control and cause a possible loss of importance of research not linked to innovation.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmed A. Mohamed ◽  
Abdullahi M. Hassan ◽  
Jennifer A. Weis ◽  
Irene G. Sia ◽  
Mark L. Wieland

Immigrants and refugees arrive to the United States healthier than the general population, but this advantage declines with increasing duration of residence. One factor contributing to this decline is suboptimal physical activity, but reasons for this are poorly understood. Persons from Somalia represent the largest African refugee population to the United States, yet little is known about perceptions of physical activity among Somali men. Somali members of a community-based participatory research partnership implemented three age-stratified focus groups and three semistructured interviews among 20 Somali men in Rochester, Minnesota. Team-based inductive analysis generated themes for barriers and facilitators to physical activity. Barriers to physical activity included less walking opportunities in the United States, embarrassment about exercise clothing and lack of familiarity with exercise equipment/modalities, fear of harassment, competing priorities, facility costs, transportation, and winter weather. Facilitators to physical activity included high knowledge about how to be active, success stories from others in their community as inspiration, and community cohesion. Findings may be used to derive interventions aimed to promote physical activity among Somali men in the United States.


2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Dupuis-Déri

An examination of the speeches of modern Canada’s “founding fathers” reveals that they were openly antidemocratic. How did a regime founded on anti-democratic ideas come to be positively identified with democracy? Drawing on similar studies of the United States and France, this analysis of the history of the term democracy in Canada shows that the country’s association with democracy was not due to constitutional or institutional changes that might have justified re-labelling the country’s political regime. Rather, it was the result of discursive strategies employed by the political elite to strengthen its ability to mobilize the masses during the World Wars.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anzhelika Solodka ◽  
Luis Perea

Compliments as speech acts have the reflection and expression of cultural values. Many of the values reflected through compliments are personal appearance, new acquisitions, possessions, talents and skills. It is especially important in linguistic interaction between people. This research aims to analyze the speech acts of complimenting in Ukrainian and American cultures in order to use them for teaching pragmatics second language (L2) students. Defining the ways of complimenting in Ukrainian, Russian and American English help to avoid misunderstandings and pragmatic failures. This study uses a method of ethnomethodology. Speach acts are studied in their natural contexts. To carry out this research native speakers of English in the United States and native speakers of Russian and Ukrainian from all over Ukraine were interviewed on-line. The analysis was made on the data that included: 445 Russian, 231 Ukrainian and 245 English compliments. Results of this study show how native speakers tend to compliment people: syntactical structure of expressions, cultural lexicon, attributes praised and language context. It has implications for teaching English to Ukrainians and for teaching Russian and Ukrainian to speakers of English. Knowing how to use speech acts allows the speaker to have pragmatic competence. Upon completion of the data analysis on the current study, further information on deeper analysis in terms of semantics and metaphorical language can be provided.


In 1947, the United States of America launched the European Recovery Programme to support the post-war reconstruction of Europe. The Marshall Plan, as it became known after U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, was one of the major success stories of US foreign policy in the twentieth century. The notion of an EU Recovery Programme for Ukraine provoked interest – and division in Ukraine. The enlargement of the EU in 2004 and 2007 demonstrated the EU’s capacity to mount grand economic and political projects. However, since then, the EU has faced difficulties exerting influence and constructing a coherent narrative of its role in the European neighbourhood and the wider world. Would a more transformative aid and development programme for its Ukrainian neighbour offer an opportunity for the EU as well as Ukraine? In this article we use a series of elite interviews conducted across Ukraine in 2016-17 to explore how such a notion is understood. We find that Ukrainian elites have mixed feelings about existing EU aid programmes; many respondents resented the conditions the EU imposes, but nor do they want or expect aid to be given unconditionally. Whilst many aspire for Ukraine to reach EU standards of law and prosperity, Ukrainian elites favour self-help in their efforts to forge a stable sovereign state. Both the EU and Russia are understood as metonymies – as standing for two sets of values and geopolitical futures – and neither quite fit what Ukrainians seek. We conclude that whilst a Marshall Plan-style action could have benefits, it is not desired as a basis for a shared narrative and basis of cooperation and development.


2022 ◽  
pp. 000276422110660
Author(s):  
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva ◽  
Crystal E. Peoples

In this paper, we examine the academy as a specific case of the racialization of space, arguing that most colleges and universities in the United States are in fact historically white colleges and universities (HWCUs). To uncover this reality, we first describe the dual relationship between space and race and racism. Using this theoretical framing, we demonstrate how seemingly “race neutral” components of most American universities (i.e., the history, demography, curriculum, climate, and sets of symbols and traditions) embody, signify, and reproduce whiteness and white supremacy. After examining the racial reality of HWCUs, we offer several suggestions for making HWCUs into truly universalistic, multicultural spaces.


2020 ◽  
pp. 113-132
Author(s):  
Montse Feu

España Libre’s authors employed several rhetorical strategies of self-representation. Alfonso Camín encouraged combative antifascism by appealing to the literary symbol of Don Quixote. With a maternalist approach, Miguel Giménez Igualada assigned women the role of caregivers to antifascist homes in exile. Away from these archetypical and traditional literary representations, Felix Martí Ibáñez inspired readers with his vision of a society finally free of fascism through individual introspection and interpersonal engagement. Moving toward a postmodern approach, writers argued that revolution was exercised by inclusion of subjectivities rather than through violent contest of political power. Other authors documented and poeticized the immigrant life in the United States and provided España Libre’s readers with a developing Spanish American exile identity in the United States.


Author(s):  
John W. Young ◽  
John Kent

This chapter focuses on the Iraq war of 2003–11 and the troubles in the Middle East. George W. Bush’s advisers, led by Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, had been considering an attack on Iraq well before 9/11. At the same time, many experts within the government pointed to the lack of any evidence for Iraqi-sponsored terrorism directed against the United States. The threats to US national security were outlined to Bush in a briefing just prior to his inauguration; these threats came primarily from al-Qaeda’s terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). The chapter first considers the US decision to invade Iraq, before discussing the war, taking into account the US’s Operation Iraqi Freedom and the war’s costs to the US and to Iraq. It also examines the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and concludes with an assessment of the ‘Arab Spring’.


Author(s):  
Mary-Anne Meyer ◽  
Melinda Ring

A large portion of adults in the United States use some form of complementary and integrative medicine, but while these therapies are offered in many hospice and palliative care programs, few patients end up accessing the therapies. Studies show that patients who receive these services are more satisfied with their care. Additionally, surveys show that nurses are often the critical factor is assessing a patient’s appropriateness for integrative care and making the referrals. This chapter reviews therapies and supplements that can be used for specific conditions, and it ends with a list of resources to help put ideas into practice.


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