Anxiety is a dimension of L2 speaking that has been heavily investigated over the past several decades, but there is a paucity of research investigating instruction aiming at lowering anxiety. While research suggests drama lowers L2 learners' anxiety, it is unclear to what extent anxiety is affected by drama. This article reports results from a…

A change in the focus of the speech communication program at Oklahoma State University (OSU) resulted from recognition during the late 1960s that the only growth potential for the speech communication field was in preparing students for work in nonacademic settings. This paper presents the current status of the program at OSU and discusses the…

A conversational skills training program for persons who admitted discomfort in most interpersonal situations and who found it difficult to initiate and maintain conversation was designed to teach these conversational behaviors: asking questions, expressing disagreement and agreement, paraphrasing, initiating conversations, giving compliments, and…

This document reports on the formalization of objectives, progress, and priorities of the five-year-plan of the Department of Speech Communication at the University of Oklahoma. The document presents a rationale and criteria for program planning based on the three major national conferences of the Speech Communication Association--The Wingspread…

The professional slant of the program in technical and scientific communication at the University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, is in contrast to the classical liberal arts tradition of academic preparation in the field of communication. The major concern of this program is to provide a curriculum and an advising strategy to make communications study…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 24 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: a social skills training program; facial kinesic correlates of terminal cancer patients; the relationships among indices of social cognition, motivation, and…

The Technical Communication Program which began in 1971 at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Rhetoric involves an applied approach to communication. Differentiating this undergraduate program from others in communication is the fact that its approach to communication skills training involves both writing and speaking, as well as…

The results of one faculty's effort to design a "state-of-the-art" undergraduate program in communication are presented in this paper. The program described in the paper was developed to reflect current theory, research, and practice in the context of an increasingly information- and communication-based society. The paper discusses the…