My dissertation The Class Room as an Oral Arena: Building and Establishing Ethos starts with the premise that every person who wants to act credibly as a democratic citizen must have a communicative competence. The purpose of this dissertation is to study how students in Swedish gymnasium build and establish ethos and how they develop their communicative competence. The study focuses on the students' ability to build and establish ethos during oral presentations and argumentations. The results show that building and establishing ethos should be regarded as different processes in the classroom. To build ethos is a process that precedes the performance, while establishing ethos occurs in the oral performance before the class. The results also show that various forms of response are very important for the manner in which the student builds and establishes ethos. It is also important that the teacher has a meta-language for oral presentations to give constructive feedback. The result also shows that the staging of exercises and test situations for oral performances affects the students' building and establishing ethos. In these exercises ethos is a variable concept, while the test situation triggers a school ethos which can be described as rigid. The reason is primarily that in the exercises the students can try different ways to express ethos, while in the oral performance the students are expected to express a personal ethos. Students can rarely practice a personal ethos. In the test situation they perform a school ethos that is perceived as foreign both to speakers and listeners in the classroom. A final result is that the teaching situation where speakers, listeners, and content are given the same attention is the teaching situation where the students can build and establish that ethos which enhances their communicative competence. Baumlin, James S. (1994). Introduction: positioning ethos in historical and contemporery theory. I: Baumlin, James S. & Baumlin, Tita French (red.) Ethos: new essays in rhetorical and critical theory. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press. S. ii-xxxi Dyste, Olga (red.) (2003). Dialog, samspel och lärande. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Kjeldsen, Jens E. ([2004] 2006). Retorikk i vår tid: en innføring i moderne retorisk teori. Oslo: Spartacus.