Introduction to the Grade Teacher special report, "Linguistics and the Language Arts.

The first step in developing a communication competency assessment instrument is determining whether there is conceptual support for such an instrument. Funding should also be determined, since speaking skills must be assessed as a person speaks, a procedure that requires more time and money to complete than in the case of machine-scored tests.…

A study of President Ronald Reagan's speeches reveals not only a President intent on "identifying directly with the people," but a spokesman adept at the use of symbolic communication as well. Probably the most obvious symbol of the campaign for economic renewal is the term "Reaganomics" itself. Referentially, it has come to…

Faculty members, as their organization's parliamentarians, must exercise appropriately their own rights as members of the organization as well as maintain loyalty to their role as parliamentarian. Add to this dilemma parliamentary indifference, and a "politics as usual" attitude and the outcome of any parliamentary session is in doubt. Such…

Reflecting the ideas of Roland Barthes, this paper examines the nature and importance of myth as a type of speech. The investigation proceeds by discussing myth from the perspectives of both traditional and contemporary disciplines, then considers the universality of myth, its religious impulse, and its functions. Using examples from television…

The silence between two people's utterances during conversation is referred to as a juncture pause and the outcome of events at the juncture pause determines who will speak next in a conversation. A study explored the nature of interruptions in young children's conversation and examined whether turn-taking repair occurred after an interruption and…

The place of argumentation within the speech communication curriculum is the focus of this article. The article provides a rationale for an upper-level college course in the deliberation and decision making process currently taught at the University of North Carolina, and relates that rationale to broader concerns of argumentation theory. Various…

Over a three-year period, 297 speech communication students were surveyed on how frequently they were exposed to the use of case studies in instruction, the settings and the extent to which case studies were used, preferences for the use of case studies, and the extent to which they liked case studies in their educational experience. The results…

Noting Martin Buber's rejection of both the permissive (individualistic) and the authoritative models of education and his dislike of clear epistemologies or systematic pedagogies, this paper examines Buber's work as an organized philosophical underpinning for dialogue in the classroom. The paper details Buber's approach to education as an…

The "speech anxiety peak experience" is the time during the speech event when the most anxiety is felt. A study tested the hypothesis that speakers would report higher communication anxiety levels at the beginning of the speech event rather than at the middle or end of the presentation. A Communication Apprehension Graph (CAG) was developed to…

The concept of rhetorical community is employed in this paper as a starting point for the study of community. Since the clarity of the concept "rhetorical community" is insufficient for purposes of building theories, the paper offers a more precise conceptual definition: a rhetorical community is a group of people who identify themselves with a…

Molefi K. Asante's Afrocentric methodology was used in analysing the rhetoric of Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, writer Toni Morrison, and sociologist Robert Staples on the women's movement. Three conclusions were drawn from this analysis: (1) that the three rhetors noted more differences than similarities between black and white females; (2) that…