Acceptance of responsibility for their written expression can be encouraged in college students through oral games which emphasize the linguistic sensibility they possessed as children. The basic elements of good written language (pleasing sounds, repetition, word play, surprise, climax) are often paralleled in riddles, game rituals, and other…

"Communication competence" refers to the knowledge an individual has about the use of language in communication. As a concept and theory, however, it needs to be further elaborated and clarified. In particular, four issues must be resolved before communication competence theory can achieve full development and exert impact in the classroom. The…

The construct of competence in interpersonal communication is conceptually refined in this paper, which first provides an extensive review and evaluation of the conceptual and empirical literature concerning competence and discusses a new taxonomy of competence constructs. The paper then offers a three-component model of relational competence that…

Linguistic models, especially the derivational theory of complexity, partially explain human comprehension of isolated sentences but not connected discourse. Two versions of a message, one entirely active sentences, the other entirely passive were written to compare transformational complexity. Subjects heard the messages at normal (150 wpm) rates…

The beginnings of a pragmatic rhetorical theory can help relate rhetoric to human meaning systems. A pragmatic rhetorical theory is not concerned with whether or not an intentional experience is true to an objective reality beyond human experience, but rather deals with how rhetoric interacts with experiences in the construction of human meaning…

A telephone conversation was transcribed and marked for stress. A portion of the transcription, not marked for stress, was given to native English speakers who were asked to underline the word(s) in each sentence or phrase that should receive the most prominent stress. The overlap of actual stress and the assignments of the participants who were…

A native speaker of a language possesses both grammatical and rhetorical competence. A grammatical model, in its deep structure, represents an "is a" relationship. It seeks to offer some explanation of a human being as a human being. A rhetorical model represents a "counts as" relationship. It seeks to offer some explanation of…

A program designed to teach English as a second language is described in this paper. The primary objective of the program is to teach adult immigrants to discriminate and articulate English speech sounds so that they are able to participate in oral communication with the English-speaking community. Following a description of the program, the…

Research evidence currently indicates that young children's communication skills for both the speaker and the listener roles are often ineffective. The accuracy of children's communication improves gradually over the elementary school years. Current thinking in the area of metacognition may be very useful in understanding the development of…

Child acquisition of Mandarin was studied with four middle class families from Taipei, Taiwan. The 2-year-olds were taped at home playing with their families. Two of the children were taped for short periods (7 hours and 9 hours), while the other two children were studied biweekly for 14 months, which resulted in 71 hours of transcribed child…

A study was carried out to ascertain whether language instructors or naive judges were more reliable in judging oral proficiency. Fifteen students were chosen from the ESL (English as a second language) center at Southern Illinois University to record a tape while reading passages in English. The tape and a questionnaire were administered to 70…

When children begin formal schooling, their fundamental communication skills, speaking and listening, are well developed but limited in scope and range; it becomes the teacher's task to assist the children in achieving communicative competence. A developmental project called "Developing Communicative Competence in Children" identifies four…

Cultures differ in rules that govern communicative behavior, and these differences can cause teacher/student miscommunication in the classroom and can also interfere with the academic performance of minority group children. These differences can be overcome, however, by knowledgeable teachers who endeavor to build and expand the communicative…

The language teacher must provide a variety of activities in the classroom in which the student can use the second language in unrehearsed, novel situations requiring, on his part, inventiveness, resourcefulness and self-assurance. There should be less emphasis on linguistic accuracy and more on truly spontaneous and creative language. In the…

In a recent paper (1977) Levenston and Blum suggested that lexical simplification operates according to universal principles, and that these derive from the individual's semantic competence in his mother tongue. This paper examines the validity of this suggestion by means of a comparative study of lexical simplification in three different…