Since 1961, the Department of Speech of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse has required all students to take a "Principles of Effective Speaking" course. Some faculty members tried repeatedly between 1967 and 1987 to increase the course from two to three credit hours and to heighten the course's emphasis on listening skills. A 1990…

Intended for use by college basic speech communication course directors and teachers, the course described in this paper is based on the model of communication competency developed by R. R. Allen and K. L. Brown. The first section of the paper presented a brief discussion of the model, which defines a competent communicator as one who is capable…

There are two philosophies concerning how teachers might best facilitate their students' acquisition of communication competence. The first, a skills-oriented philosophy, adopts a building-block approach to the acquisition of communication competence. Organizationally, a public speaking course might start with a unit on analyzing audience and…

The undergraduate organizational communication series at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs has been designed to develop competency through knowledge, skills, sensitivity, and values. The four courses in the series--Introduction to Organizational Communication, Business and Professional Communication, Advanced Organizational…