engleski

Students' perception of Greta Thunberg as a speaker

The speech Greta Thunberg gave at the UN's Climate Action Summit sparked great attention as well as numerous controversies. The first controversy results from the formality of the venue and the present audience, and the second one from the speaker: a young girl with the Asperger syndrome who is also a non-expert. Even though the speaker says in her speech that she shouldn't be there but in school, she came to the UN Summit stage with ethos – a prediscursive one. That is, she had been known in public for her activism before the UN Summit. In order to determine who the speaker refers to during her speech, an analysis of the used pronouns was conducted. Besides many Is, especially in the first part of the speech, the speaker uses you for the present audience, governments, corporations, us for everyone, young people and herself, we for everyone (every living creature), young generation, general public. Since she is speaking as a representative of young people, a survey was conducted among students of Zagreb School of Economics and Management in order to analyze their attitudes to the speech. The research included students (N=99) from the first to the fifth year, studying in Croatian and English language. The sample also included exchange students studying at ZSEM. Research questions (N=10) covered the role of the language, ecological awareness, age, and education in perception of quality, attractiveness of the speech, the use of ethos, pathos and logos, persuasiveness and the influence potential. Their attitudes to selected questions were measured against the Likert scale. The results show that the students studying in English assign a higher grade to the speaker for her naturalness, persuasiveness, adaptation to the audience and speech attractiveness. However, they would not change their habits due to her speech. Interestingly, in socio-demographic questions, students studying in English assessed themselves higher for ecological awareness than students studying in Croatian. Both groups of students assess the speech equally for emotionality and persuasiveness. As online media are the primary source of information for young people in Croatia (Zoričić, 2018), the survey results shall be compared to the image of Greta Thunberg in the most popular Croatian electronic media.

Greta Thunberg ; UN's Climate Action Summit ; peer's perception survey ; audience analysis

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