An abundance of academic research has focused on identifying, explicating, operationalizing, and analyzing variables used to understand the dynamics of customer service. Despite this scholarly attention, applied researchers and the popular press have long reported consumers' dissatisfaction with the service received during their customer…

Bakhtin's language theories give educators a view into how people develop and communicate with language through dialogue. These conceptions can be applied to teaching in a variety of positive ways. The authors explore how teaching based on Bakhtinian concepts might function in the classroom, paying particular attention to the concepts of dialogue,…

Discusses assignments in discourse analysis and students' recurring methodological errors. (PD)

Results of exploratory investigation indicate that failures to communicate management information systems (MIS) concepts can result from the sender's communication style being inappropriate to the receiver's cognitive type. Details of the research methodology, analysis of variance, and summary of results are given, as well as recommendations for…

In fall 1994, students in an interdisciplinary Gender Issues course undertook a project to examine gender and communication patterns through analyses of their own videotaped conversations and to relate their conclusions to findings in the literature. Students read two articles on the distribution of home responsibilities between professionally…

In a sociolinguistic study of five transcripts of high school discussions, two analyses were conducted. The first was a detailed qualitative analysis of the data, which combined paralinguistic features with three perspectives: a speech act analysis, a conversation analysis, and an interaction analysis. In the second, more quantitative analysis,…

One hundred studies on small group communication that were published in speech communication journals from 1969 to 1978 are summarized and critiqued in this paper. The literature is classified into three new lines of research (critical variable, process, and tangential) and three continuing lines of research (leadership, discussion, and pedagogy).…

A study investigated how oral discourse affects the communicative process of teaching and learning and how that process influences and is influenced by the goals and expectations of college instructors and college students. Three college classes were observed for one semester. Data were collected in the form of field notes, cassette tapes of…

This paper investigates the potential relationship of Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) to gesture and second language learning. It is asserted that the ZPD is both a tool and a result, not a tool for result; it is both product and process at the same time. The process of learning a new language/culture in the case of a person who is…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 11 titles deal with the following topics: (1) the relation between classroom communication and teacher personality; (2) a survey of speech programs in Texas community colleges; (3) improving student responses by training teachers…