On Consultative Mentoring Discourse Of High School English Open Class:A Rhetoric Study

On the basis of a corpus from different levels of high school English demonstration lessons, this thesis studies consultative mentoring discourse from the perspective of rhetorics by adopting the methods of corpus analysis, literature review and interviews.The main findings are:1. With a suggestion proportion of 0.68%, consultative characteristic of school level mentoring discourse is not so prominent as interschool and national level. There are more suggestions than praises in 75% of interschool level and 64% of national level mentoring discourse. More rhetoric techniques are used in interschool and national level mentoring discourses. Besides, the national level mentoring discourse pays more attention to conciseness of language, integrity of textual construction and clearness of organization.2. Possible reasons for the phenomena mentioned above are:(1) For school level demonstration lessons, the relationship between mentors and mentees is closer than the other two levels, so mentors are more reluctant to give suggestions; (2) The scale of demonstration lessons increases gradually from school level, interschool level to national level, which has a deep effect on the demonstration and normalization of mentoring discourse; (3) Mentors' mentoring attainment of interschool and national level is better than school level.3. Characteristics and rhetoric techniques of consultative mentoring discourse are as follows:(1) In terms of the content, there are more suggestions than praises; the order of mentoring is usually greetings, praises, questionings, suggestions, and acknowledgments; Besides, mentoring discourse is usually in a consultative tone and both strict and amiable. (2) Two categories of rhetoric techniques are used. One is assistant techniques that avoid conflicts, such as greeting, praising, learning, being considerate, acknowledging, being modest and being humorous. The other is techniques that polish the discourse in a rhetoric way, such as guiding, deking, casing, quoting, highlighting, weakening and door-in-the-face.This study provides practical techniques and examples for mentors.