THE IMPORTANCE OF RHETORIC IN TEACHING

Abstract

This paper presents activities that can be used in order to enforce the use of rhetoric in teaching. The conversation is the method in which general, linguistic, and analytical culture comes to expression, but also the logic of students and teachers and their engagement. The conversation requires a subtle approach and impeccable knowledge of the language, didactic and various tactics, as well as mutual respect of interlocutors, where exceptional and successful answers are followed by the expressions of joy and satisfaction. The reward for successful conversation is the tact, acknowledgment, and acceptance of the answer with a positive facial expression; the atmosphere expressed in countless ways supporting or disputing the given answers.There are some crucial differences between conversation and oral presentation methods. The oral presentation method is followed by rules, where the speech is organized in a hierarchical way, and the roles of students and teachers are previously well-known and hierarchically assigned. The teacher is responsible for the idea, plan, dynamics, tempo and the rhythm of the oral presentation, while students act more as listeners, with a few possibilities to induce the oral presentation and have some effect on it. The level of material processing in the oral presentation method is the role of the teacher, and the student has more of a passive role as its role is reduced to listening and interpreting. This is why the oral presentation method is often criticized, named as verbalistic, and marked negatively with the demand to be less used in teaching, and when used, to be complemented by other teaching methods.The problem that follows conversation method activities in teaching presents the topic with crucial importance in didactics, as the conversation method is most frequently used by teachers. This problem has its own importance in both pedagogy and developmental psychology since it is very important to determine which teaching methods and forms of teaching are most suitable for transferring the knowledge from teacher to student. The aim of this paper is to tackle some of the problems that applying rhetoric in teaching, and its activities might carry. In my opinion, this paper presents systematization of knowledge in the field of introducing rhetoric in the teaching, which could benefit all parties interested in this way of teaching, as I, myself have learned a lot of new things while writing this paper and searching for new ways to introduce rhetoric in teaching.