The 30 listening and speaking activities in this collection are designed to motivate students to use foreign languages for communicating their ideas and to encourage students to be creative. The criteria for including the activities were: (1) proven effectiveness toward improving students' oral language proficiency; (2) ease of adaptability to any…

Foreigner talk (FT) has been characterized as speech "used by speakers of a language to outsiders who are felt to have limited command of a language or no knowledge of it," or "the variety of language that is regarded by a speech community as primarily appropriate for addressing foreigners." A study was carried out in Germany…

This text, designed for future teachers of English as a second or foreign language, considers language teaching methodology in the light of recent research in psychology and linguistics. Many aspects of language learning that contribute to effective language use are discussed: oral communication, pronunciation, grammar instruction, listening…

A workshop was given to identify and point out the limitations of mechanical language laboratory drills, and to compare them to drills which have been classified as being meaningful or communicative. Mechanical drills do not require an understanding of the meaning of the sentence; there is not consideration of context; and there is no connection…

A study was conducted to determine if communication apprehensive students enrolled in a basic speech communication course preferred specific instructional methods and perceived these methods as beneficial in reducing public speaking anxiety. During four consecutive semesters, 620 undergraduate students completed the Personal Report of…

The second language learning methods of Southern Baptist missionaries in Zambia are described. Instead of studying the new language in a school setting, the student receives a week of orientation and is then placed in the community and expected to practice communicating with the native speakers at every opportunity. The student follows a course…

A study is presented which attempts to clarify the notion of communicative proficiency in a foreign language and which outlines an instructional model that incorporates the insights of the study. Communicative proficiency is defined as fluent mastery of the foreign language in different contexts. The definition was operationalized into discourse…

Concerned with providing managerial assessment centers with oral communication criteria against which communication apprehension may be measured, the convergent validity of the Personal Report of Communication Apprehension--Organization Form (PRCA-OF) was tested against 23 raters' scores in five one-day developmental assessment centers. The…

Intended for young debators, this booklet lists the main events of a debate contest for Japanese college students. The booklet contains transcripts and articles from the debate in which the proposition that the Japanese government should significantly strengthen its policies to protect the Japanese people from foreign nations was debated. The…

The nine articles in this focused journal issue are concerned with the revolution brought about by the video display terminal as the medium for television and the computer. Among the topics discussed in the articles are (1) the influence of television on students, (2) writing and word processing, (3) reservations about word processing for student…

A survey of 163 women associate professors and professors was conducted to determine the characteristics that have contributed to the success of women in the communication disciplines. The profile that emerged reveals the successful female college faculty member to be a person with a Ph.D, on tenure, who is not interested in being an…

Which, when, and how elements of a fashion are adopted by a particular person or group are indicators of how that person or group is viewed by others within their society. For men who have worked in business and commerce, the clothing has changed little since the rise of the commercial middle class. The business suit remains unaltered because its…

The current style-specific theories of human communication include the public speaking style, the relationship style, and the message communication style. It now appears that intercultural communication may emerge as the fourth style-specific theory as a result of scholars' concern over the ethnocentric bias found in the study of communication.…

A four-year study by the Bay Area Writing Project was conducted to determine the writing competency of inner-city secondary school students on proficiency tests. To determine whether patterns among secondary students reflected developmental trends, the study also examined samples of student writing from grades 4 through 12, for the years 1978,…

There are at least four distinct uses of the term "competence" in speech communication: (1) to refer to some set of standards used in evaluating aspects of communication processes, (2) to refer to some set of objects to be evaluated, (3) to refer to a method for evaluating aspects of communication against some standard, and (4) to refer to a…