The focus of the contributions to this journal issue is communication theory and research. Following an introductory article that deals with the need for quality control in the criticism of communication research, eight articles offer discussions of the following topics: the nature of criticism in rhetorical and communicative studies, some issues…

A total of 79 college students participated in an investigation designed to clarify the function of conversational closings. Multidimensional scaling was used to derive a three-dimensional representation of the semantic meaning conveyed by 20 frequently used conversational closings. Regression analyses of the scaling solution suggested that the…

A conversational skills training program for persons who admitted discomfort in most interpersonal situations and who found it difficult to initiate and maintain conversation was designed to teach these conversational behaviors: asking questions, expressing disagreement and agreement, paraphrasing, initiating conversations, giving compliments, and…

In research to test the link between children's failure to engage in comparison activity and their poor communication performance, elementary school students were trained to engage in comparison activity to learn whether such training would improve their referential communication accuracy. Two training experiments with third and fourth grade…

To ascertain the continued need for a campus radio station at 10 watts and to justify a subsequent increase in power, the student radio station at Auburn University (Alabama) conducted surveys of college radio stations, emphasizing facilities in the southeast United States. Some of the findings of the surveys indicated that in the southeast and…

An examination of the impact that process instructions have on jury deliberations was conducted using ten juries of six members each. Five of the juries were given standard jury instructions, while the remaining five were given step-by-step instructions in the deliberation process designed especially for that trial. The results indicated that…

Of 782 undergraduate students enrolled in either interpersonal communication or public speaking courses, the 125 students scoring high in communication apprehension were retested upon completion of the courses and analyzed for their responses to a student attitudes survey. Significantly greater numbers of the high communication apprehensive (HCA)…

This bulletin, the fourth in a series, describes the Demonstration City Project in Danbury, Connecticut, a model school system designed to research and develop federally-funded programs in close cooperation with educational consultants. Central to the project's goal of turning potential into accomplishment and bringing children up to grade level,…

The similarity between the antecedents of listening and the consequences of speaking have long led theorists to believe in their intimate and even natural relationship. A tendency to conflate the two processes is found in articles on speech communication, automatic speech recognition, foreign language learning, and child language. Once this…

This study examines, through the use of a group screening instrument, the oral language comprehension skills of elementary school children. The screening instrument was composed of 60 experimental sentences of varying syntactic complexity. Each sentence contained a specific function word or combination of function words which conveyed a direction…

This study explores male/female patterns of dominance in dyadic speech communication in order to determine the influence of speaker's sex, speaker's commitment to the women's movement, and observer feedback on those patterns. College students (30 males and 30 females) responded to an "attitudes-toward-women" questionnaire and were classified as…

The central and most common element in existing conceptualizations of communication competency is the concept of control, which suggests that competency is a function of the communicator's ability to exert influence over physical and social surroundings. This paper identifies six phases of the control process: goal specification, information…

The development of the communicative competence test for college business majors described in this paper consisted of three phases. The first phase identified as desirable the following communication behaviors: planning, logic, perception, communication without fear or anxiety, listening, oral communication, conference leadership, and nonverbal…

This paper discusses communication and physical-setting variables as a subset of organizational climate variables and attempts to provide a theoretical and methodological framework for organizational communication research. Attention is focused on the effects of immediate physical surroundings, the physical settings in which people work, and how…

The five papers that constitute this issue of the "Journal of the Arizona Communication and Theatre Association" represent interest in a direction for interpretation studies which has proved rewarding for traditional students as well as for people outside typical classroom settings. With literature firmly at the center, many teachers and scholars…