MED Magazine - MED Web Watch

MED Magazine - Issue 49 - February 2008

MED Web Watch
by Mairi MacDonald

Next in a series of short articles looking at web resources useful for teachers and learners of English. As a rough guide, each site is marked out of 25 in terms of content, design and ease-of-use.

American Rhetoric
http://www.americanrhetoric.com

Americanrhetoric.com is an impressive collection of over 5000 sound files from speeches, lectures, films and songs. Speeches as recent as Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize lecture in December 2007, video footage from Winston Churchill's 'Iron Curtain' speech of 1946 and Russell Crowe addressing the Roman army at the beginning of Gladiator are just a few examples of what this site offers.

To browse the site, click on Speech Bank in the left-hand menu. This gives an alphabetical listing of all the speeches featured on the site. Movie Speeches is an alphabetical index of all the films featured on the site and Top 100 speeches gives a list of what are deemed to be the 100 most significant American political speeches, organised by decade and rank (number 1 is Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’). There is also a search facility.

The sound files are accompanied by text and are great for listening practice. By its very nature, rhetoric provides a rich source of language, and from a teaching perspective, the most useful part of the site is the Figures in sound section. This contains snippets from speeches - some with video footage - illustrating 40 different types of literary device, such as metaphor, simile and hyperbole. There are five or six examples in each section and the extracts are clear and succinct. A speech by George Clooney illustrates alliteration in a short video clip from O Brother Where Art thou, and in case you're ever struggling to find an example of epizeuxis, there's a short video clip of Tony Blair attacking John Major in the House of Commons. Or maybe you’d prefer an excerpt from The Incredibles to illustrate anesis?

Obviously there is a heavy American bias to the material, but a few contributions from the likes of Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher provide some UK content.

On the negative side, the site is let down by its overall design and cumbersome navigation. In the alphabetical lists, you need to hit the back button to get back to the main page or scroll down to the bottom of a very long page to find the menu; sometimes you can even find yourself stranded on a completely different site. The section headings can be misleading, for example Rhetorical literacy refers to 30 important speeches in 21st Century America. The ads are distracting (placed right where you expect the content to be) and the site is best viewed with a pop-up blocker. That said, don't let this put you off, this site is definitely worth a rummage - there's quality material here to suit all ages and levels of student.

Score
current and archived content
up-to-dateness/topicality
graphic design and navigation
speed and technical performance
features and functionality
overall score	20 out of 25