Teaching poetry offers both challenges and promises for student engagement and response. Because of the ways many students interact with poems in school settings--with an emphasis on the technical elements of poems, rather than on the emotional resonances they evoke--for many learners, poetry can often seem elusive and uncommonly difficult. This…

This paper introduces the subject of communication apprehension and presents five group-based exercises for the basic public speaking course. The paper notes that communication apprehension can affect people's personal and occupational lives, and that visualization, skills training, and systematic desensitization are methods that can help control…

Intended for use by speech and communication scholars, this paper uses the extensive body of research on communication apprehension as the basis for a discussion of three conventional approaches toward the treatment of excessive communication apprehension: systematic desensitization, social skills development, and cognitive modification/rational…