As the business world has recognized the practical value of college programs designed to prepare students for careers, internships have begun to receive increasing attention as valuable additions to the speech communication curriculum. To discover the problems both interns and their faculty advisers face during the course of an internship,…

Sound-meaning correspondences produced by an infant were studied under conditions of early rampant homonymy (i.e., production by a very young child of a small set of noncontrastive surface forms or phonetic sequences to refer to objects/events that on the basis of adult standards require the production of numerous contrasting surface forms). The…

Two trends indicate the importance of competent communication skills in teacher preparation. The first is the professional commitment of the Speech Communication Association (SCA) to speech communication education. At various conferences, the SCA has made recommendations for speech communication training for teachers at all levels and for research…

Research reports on the nature of speech, instrumentation for the investigation of speech, and practical application of research are included in this status report for January 1-March 31, 1981. The reports deal with the following topics: (1) distinguishing temporal information for speaking rate from temporal information for intervocalic stop…

A study investigated the degree of association between supervisor and subordinate perceptions of the supervisor's leadership style, use of power, and conflict management style. Subjects were 87 supervisors and 432 subordinates from five service-oriented, publicly supported organizations. The supervisors completed measures of leadership style, use…

Freshman composition students at a community college in Maryland participated in a study to determine whether the talk-write method of writing instruction would have a more positive effect on freshman writing than would more conventional methods of instruction. Four classes totaling 58 students were randomly divided into an experimental and a…

The relationship between higher cognitive teacher questions and the nature of the cognitive thought processes involved in the student answers was investigated. Literature was reviewed, resulting in the selection of Blooms Taxonomy, and the Aschner and Gallagher, Smith and Meux systems for classifying higher cognitive thought processes. A pilot…

The relationship between speech and print is essentially asymmetrical and changes as the reading ability of the child improves. For the child who has succeeded at decoding, the asymmetry implies that commonalities between speech and print are more important than their differences. Three hypothetical observation points illustrate the similarity…

Most speech communication curricula have room for only three organizational courses: (1) business and professional speech communication (B and P), usually offered to freshmen and sophomores; (2) an introduction to organizational communication, presented to sophomores and upper-class students; and (3) a seminar in organizational communication, for…

A review of more than 100 articles and papers in interpersonal and small group communication (ISG) research done in 1977 and a survey of active researchers revealed that it was difficult to identify significant trends in content and methodology as well as to note specific advances and problems reflected in the research. However, six issues or…

A growing number of speech communication graduates are unable to find employment in their field. To ameliorate this situation, speech communication educators should consider the following three recommendations. First, the mission of higher education should be reassessed. In addition to the creation and dissemination of knowledge, higher education…

Forty undergraduate students were subjects in a study to discover students' attitudes toward language and grammar and to determine how the demand for grammatical correctness affected them in preparing and delivering public speeches. The subjects each completed an 11-item interview schedule that elicited demographic information as well as feelings…

Recent restrictions in funds made available to higher education, reinforced by declining birth rates and slowing or falling enrollments, are forcing an adjustment of thinking by educators. The growth of the last 20 years was not the normal state of higher education. Educators have come to think that bigger is better as enrollments and faculty have…

When Democratic Senator William Proxmire attacked the Bicentennial Youth Debates, jointly sponsored by the Speech Communication Association (SCA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), for fiscal wastefulness, SCA president Lloyd Bitzer offered a public rebuttal to the charge. The three major standards of ethicality and…

Designed to answer some of the questions concerning the nature of professional ethics in the fields of anthropology, psychology, and sociology, this report outlines the range of ethical concerns of these three disciplines and describes the way in which these concerns have been previously presented. The first of the three sections of the report…