Teaching Japanese EFL learners literary devices using　Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech

摘要

This paper examines the unique discourse features of Martin Luther King Jr.ʼs historic speech,“I Have a Dream”, which was delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington,D.C., in 1963. The paper begins with a brief description of the context in which King gave hisspeech by considering the social and political climate, the location, temporal setting, and thecultural circumstances in which the speech was delivered. Next, the author will consider the uniquerhetorical discourse features that are found in Kingʼs speech. These include such aspects as thelinguistic structure within the text, cohesion and the particular genre of the speech. Finally, thispaper shows how this text can be used to increase Japanese university EFL learnersʼ awareness ofliterary devices such as gurative language, metaphor, parallelism, rhyme and simile.