As increasing numbers of postsecondary learners enroll in commuter campuses, speech communication departments can identify the characteristics which make commuting students somewhat different from their counterparts on residential campuses. Priorities of these two groups differ--students whose primary focus in life is the college experience…

Although a growing number of speech communication departments are developing internship programs, the ethical issues involved are rarely addressed, even though communication interns and intern directors are potentially involved in ethical issues merely by their involvement in the discipline of communication. There are three areas to consider from…

With the increased interest in public relations education, it is important for educators to be aware of options available for enhancing the effectiveness of teaching in this area. A number of nonprint learning resources are available, including internships, in-class campaigns, and national competitions. Public relations internships are essentially…

An examination of the word-finding problems and nonverbal communication in the conversations of three aphasic patients revealed three different patterns of communicative strategies and success in different kinds of activities, such as tests and conversation. One, with mainly a parietal lesion, hesitates often with turn-keeping gestures and stops…

The United States Air Force is unique among the armed services in placing all its professional military education (PME) and professional continuing education (PCE) under a single command. Furthermore, most of the schools and courses are in the same geographical location at the Maxwell/Gunter complex in Montgomery, Alabama. There are basic…

Twenty years of research in interpersonal communication have provided teachers with a basis for identifying the competencies that should be taught in introductory interpersonal communication courses, including empathy, social composure, and conflict management. However, other issues such as "performance vs. knowledge," the affective dimension, and…

Although the role that empathy plays in communication transactions is an important one, there is a great deal of confusion surrounding that term as it is used in the field of communication. Empathy may be best defined as a process consisting of 3 stages: (1) decentering, which requires a shift in focus or multiple perspectives; (2) role-taking,…

The educational benefits of debate suggest several reasons for funding debate programs on college campuses. First, debate training improves communication skills (analysis, delivery, and organization) and helps students in other communication situations. Second, debate promotes depth of educational experience by exposing students to important…

The construct of competence in interpersonal communication is conceptually refined in this paper, which first provides an extensive review and evaluation of the conceptual and empirical literature concerning competence and discusses a new taxonomy of competence constructs. The paper then offers a three-component model of relational competence that…

Two hypotheses were posed in a study that examined the communicative consequences of structured versus nonstructured tasks on subjects with varying levels of communication apprehension (CA): (1) task structure and level of CA will interact to predict behavioral disruption in dyads, and (2) CA and evaluation will interact to predict behavioral…

Within the realm of forensic oral interpretation, concern over the use of profanity in presentations has aroused repressive criticism from some judges, who then express their offense by ranking the performance negatively. This judicial opposition is deleterious not only to the precepts of oral interpretation, but also--in a larger sense--to the…

A study examined the effects of training in argumentation and of initial candidate preference on perceptions and evaluations of presidential candidate debates. Subjects, 490 undergraduate speech communication students, were randomly assigned to three experimental conditions--control (no training), criteria only, and criteria plus explanations for…

Scholars and consultants have offered a multitude of definitions of listening. One group defines listening as an ongoing, nonstatic process by which spoken language is converted into meanings in the mind. The other group, the sequentialists, view listening as a linear sequence of events in which one aspect is dependent upon a preceding aspect.…

Based on a review of the literature, this paper examines criticisms leveled against the communication audit developed by the International Communication Association (ICA) and then offers a modified version of the audit designed to meet those criticisms. Following a brief introduction, the first section of the paper reviews criticisms of the audit,…

An error analysis of the oral production of Korean adults learning English was performed on informant speech samples, using Corder's Algorithm for providing data for description of idiosyncratic dialects as a guide for determing error. The procedures of error analysis and morpheme acquisition studies were combined to address the following…