Communication to the lay audience is a critical skill in academia. To equip students with this skill, we developed a new workshop and assessment. Postgraduate students attended a 1.5-hour workshop taught by a communication expert to develop communication skills and deliver engaging presentations. They were then asked to develop a 10-minute podcast…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of a program based on the Toastmasters Approach on developing EFL student teachers' oral communication skills. The study adopted the pre-experimental one group pre-posttest design. Participants comprised a voluntary group (N = 9) from third year, English Department (basic education),…

Research indicates that the fear of public speaking is an extraordinarily common phobia and that a significant portion of the population experiences some form of anxiety over public speaking. Although there is a great deal of research available on the etiology of public speaking anxiety, there is far less research available on interventional…

A group of five graduate students and a faculty mentor used the cultural popularity of forensics to develop a first-year undergraduate seminar. This course fulfilled two main objectives: First, the graduate student instructors developed professionally through a two-year process of creating, instructing, and revising a course. Second, a variety of…

What causes students to leave school? According to Azzam (2007), over 47% of students in the United States who drop out of school reported they did so because school was boring and irrelevant to their life situation. What can schools and teachers do to encourage students to stay in school? One possible solution may be to look at experiential…

Competitive intercollegiate debate programs have long been premised on the unique educational opportunity the activity affords its participants. The central problem with National Debate Tournament (NDT) rounds is that policy advocacy too frequently occurs, reducing questions asked to one of whether advantages outweigh disadvantages. While issues…

The Oral Communication Program at Radford University (Virginia) is designed to: (1) provide programming, facilities, and professional expertise to help students and faculty improve oral communication skills; and (2) support and facilitate the incorporation of oral communication into the undergraduate curriculum throughout the university, using the…