Many teachers develop oral communication skills through questioning, discussion, Socratic seminars, think-pair-shares, jigsaws, and small-group projects. To these activities the author has added poetry under the auspices of Poetry Out Loud, a national program that asks students to memorize and recite poems. On its website (www.poetryoutloud.org/),…

This paper presents a classroom management technique designed to bring an ordered routine and smooth beginning to each public speaking class. A student-read announcement or article is used to start the class. The paper explains the goals and gives directions for use of this technique. An introductory lesson which covers the fundamentals of…

This paper begins by pointing out that approximately 15-20% of college students suffer from a fear of public speaking, and that a 1993 study of 369 students at Northern Kentucky University revealed high levels of speech apprehension (SA) at the beginning of the semester in the introductory speech course. The paper reports that although…

This paper asserts that by removing speech and rhetoric from the "English" department and making composition a stepchild of literature, Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities ultimately made it much more difficult for writing instructors today to capitalize on the strong physical underpinnings that speech and rhetoric provide to writing.…

This paper takes a ethnomethodological look at a typical Experiential Self-Empowerment Approach (ESA)-using speech class to see how the ESA uses 12 assumptions as background expectancies (Heritage, 1984) to accomplish personal growth in college public speaking classes. The following assumptions are addressed: (1) students deserve "something…