Ebook: A Genre Analysis of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream and Its Use in Asian EFL Classrooms

In this paper, the author discusses the particular discourse features of Dr. Martin Luther King's historic speech, ”I Have a Dream”, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., in 1963. The paper will first begin with a brief description of the context, including the location, temporal setting, and the social and cultural circumstances in which the speech was delivered. Second, the author will provide a discourse analysis of the specific rhetorical discourse features unique to Dr. King's speech, which include the genre, linguistic structure, and cohesion within the text. Finally, this paper will address the implications of using this speech with English as foreign language (EFL) learners to teach literary devices such as metaphor, simile, figurative language, rhyme and parallelism.