Part of the Grade Teacher special report, "Linguistics and the Language Arts

The increasing number of part-time faculty, especially in university speech communication departments, appears to provide vital continuity in professional development. There are three kinds of part-time faculty: those with new doctoral degrees who want to teach full time but who cannot find appointments, those who are still active or semiactive…

A free response self-evaluation instrument to determine the existence of communication apprehension or anxiety has been used at Pennsylvania State University and Mansfield State College in Pennsylvania as part of their programs to identify reticent and communication apprehensive students. The instrument is administered as an assignment on the…

The teaching of public speaking and oral presentation is a challenge to many business communication instructors. One solution is an interdisciplinary approach involving the cooperation of the speech and business administration departments. In the first week of the quarter the business communications instructor has conferences with the students to…

Although Britain's Open University employs television case studies resembling the documentaries seen on general service television as part of its multimedia distance learning system, evaluations of the program have shown that many students were unable to achieve the learning objectives put forth by the program producers. Because of production…

Suggestions for the development of a national perspective on the place of functional communication competencies in the speech communication curriculum are presented in this paper. The first section of the paper describes current trends in functional communication curriculum development, including the theoretical perspectives underlying various…

Four position papers are presented that were given during a study-week dealing with questions related to language as communication, the notion of argumentation in second language teaching methodology, and ways of introducing argumentation phenomena into the language class. The papers, representing four different positions, are the following: (1)…

This paper describes the components of the interdisciplinary, kindergarten through grade twelve communication skills program developed by educators in the Lincoln, Nebraska, public schools. The paper contains (1) a brief discussion of the background of the communication skills program; (2) an overview of its characteristics; (3) statements of the…

A study was undertaken to determine the relationship between assertiveness and communication apprehension by examining common factors that exist between the items on the Rathus Assertiveness Schedule and the Personal Report of Communication Apprehension. The two instruments were administered to students at a large midwestern university. Responses…

A study explored whether cues given in advance of messages presented through noise were effective for increasing comprehension. Specifically, the study examined whether (1) relevant cues increased overall listening accuracy and (2) irrelevant cues impaired listening by introducing distortions into the processing of messages or simply decreased the…

The following papers and reports on discourse analysis are included here: (1) "Discourse Analysis, What's That?" by Hatch and Long; (2) "Contextual Analysis of English: Applications to TESL" by Celce-Murcia; (3) "Discourse and Second Language Acquisition of Yes/No Questions" by Vander Brook, Schlue, and Campbell; (4)…

Portions of three earlier studies relating differences in employees to employee satisfaction and one study relating management communication style (MCS) to employee satisfaction were replicated across four organizational contexts. Major findings supported the generalizability of the results revealed in the earlier research. The role of…