An Exploratory Analysis of Rhetorical Device Use in Korean University Students’ English Presentation Scripts

This exploratory, small-scale study examines the use of rhetorical devices in Korean university students’ English presentation scripts. Ten scripts collected during the fall semester of 2025 were analyzed to identify distributional patterns across discourse sections (introduction, body, conclusion), individual variation in strategic diversity, and associations between rhetorical diversity and lexical complexity (Type–Token Ratio). Quantitative analyses showed that aporia, rhetorical questions, and anaphora were the most frequently used devices, with section-sensitive distributional tendencies across scripts. Learners also differed substantially in the breadth of their rhetorical repertoires, indicating notable individual variation in strategy deployment. A moderate positive association was observed between rhetorical device diversity and lexical complexity. Taken together, these findings suggest the pedagogical value of explicit rhetorical instruction in EFL presentation contexts while underscoring the exploratory scope and limited generalizability of the present dataset.