Improvisation is an effective tool for developing actors' skills. It can also be a powerful and unique means for enhancing customer service skills in the contemporary academic library environment. Interactions between library users and librarians / library staff can often be complicated and require excellent listening and communication skills.…

Courses: Public speaking; communication courses requiring speeches. Objective: Students will learn how to apply humor principles to speeches through a slideshow method supportive of this goal, and to become more discerning about the possibilities and pitfalls of humorous communication.

Becoming a professional worker involves a wide range of cognitive, social, and cultural processes that have received extensive attention over the past decades amongst various disciplines. It is also not external to language use and communication. Novices in any occupation have to learn technical terms and are expected to master specific discourse…

Completing doctoral dissertations is difficult work and may be harder for distance students physically separated from institutional and collegial supports. Inability to complete independent research contributes to doctoral student attrition. Factors impacting completion include institutional factors, student characteristics, and supervisory…

Teaching in a monolingual/monocultural, non-English speaking environment can at times be frustrating. Teachers want their students to genuinely communicate with each other in socially acceptable ways, and at the same time become more aware of cultural traits. What is needed in a classroom is a reaction that is real because it is spontaneous. This…

In today's increasingly visual world, the art of giving presentations is a much-needed talent. "They Snooze, You Lose", provides a comprehensive guide made especially for teachers and administrators who want to become presentation "stars" in their classrooms, at board meetings, or any time they are in front of an audience. This book describes how…

Feelings of anxiety, apprehension and nervousness are commonly expressed by second/foreign language learners in learning to speak a second/foreign language. These feelings are considered to exert a potentially negative and detrimental effect on communication in the target language. I shall dwell on my own experience as a practitioner of ELT, and…

The promotion of language and social skill development for young children occurs in multiple contexts with a range of empirically validated methods. One specific intervention strategy used to promote language and communication would be to arrange the environment so that it is structured to elicit a range of communicative functions, such as…

"Presidentialese" is a curious dialect of higher education jargon. A humorous description of the language of higher education, as it pertains to college presidents and their ability to circumvent the truth, is presented. (MLW)

Discusses how managers can handle change and cope with stress, describes a number of books that address these issues, and relates them to library administration. Highlights include organizational change; stress reduction; human behavior and the tools of change; communication skills; leadership strategies; and the use of humor. (LRW)