This chapter of "The Best of the Best of ERIC," Volume 2, contains 15 summaries of documents and journals on communication skills, all of which are indexed in either "Resources in Education" or "Current Index to Journals in Education." The materials included deal with various aspects of the topic, such as communication problems between principals…

This paper discusses several studies related to the interplay of verbal and nonverbal communication in young children and presents educational implications of this research. Two areas of nonverbal communication are considered: kinesics, or the use of body movements as displays of affection and emotion and as regulators of communication, and…

Junior high school students (N=104) were given instruction using programed booklets on modular addition. Twelve conditions of verbal mediation were randomly assigned to students. Conditions were defined by presence or absence of introductory discussion (2 levels), number of worked examples (2 levels), and type of rule (3 levels: specific, general,…

Right dislocations are expressions of the following form: (1) "They told the Grand Jury a number of lies, the Nixon men." (2) "We find we have to limit our social schedule, my husband and I." (3) "Mary always wears a frown, the ugly witch." They are found also almost exclusively in the spoken language. This paper…

This is a research report on the acquisition and development of language in children from 4 to 6 years as observed in the pre-elementary grades. The research was done by a number of teams scattered throughout France, and this book is a collection of the papers prepared as a result of their research. The report is divided into five sections. The…

This book was designed to meet five specific criteria which allow development of a course parallel to the treatment of the book's subject matter, active student involvement in testing and developing their own nonverbal communication capacities, delineation and analysis of the functional capacity of different nonverbal communication systems, an…

The effects of live and symbolic modeling on the conservation of equalities and inequalities were studied with items spanning three stimulus dimensions (length, number, and two dimensional space). A total of 48 kindergarten children, who had failed to conserve on any equality items in baseline measures, were randomly assigned, in equal groups, to…

This paper presents information on isolated children and describes a study being undertaken to examine the role of isolation in reported cases of child abuse and neglect. The effects of extreme isolation on language and psychological development are emphasized. The importance of early socialization is seen in relation to normal development.…

While most foreign language programs list communicative language use as a primary goal, classroom tests seldom reflect this objective but rather focus on discrete-point linguistic competence. The authors present a model of the communication process and point to the main task in constructing tests of communicative competence: devising simulated…

The purposes of this study were to: (1) design a usable and valid modern verbal interaction analysis instrument and (2) to explore the verbalization taking place in selected ninth-grade physical science classrooms by utilizing the Modern Science Interaction Instrument (MSII). Two groups of ninth-grade physical science teachers participated. One of…

Included in a current genre of studies on dyadic interaction (i.e., communication involving only two people), the study reported herein focuses on dyadic verbal, nonverbal, and proxemic behaviors and their meanings. The study is inductive in nature and is, by intent, descriptive and analytic rather than predictive. The subjects for the study were…

This study was designed to determine if the sociodramatic play behavior of two groups of children would be similar when socioeconomic status was held constant. Subjects were 54 black and 54 white kindergartens of high socioeconomic status. Sociodramatic play is defined as play in which a child takes on a role, elaborates a theme in cooperation…

Cultural attitudes and values are a widely acknowledged category of psychological variables with special relevance to intercultural communication, interaction, and training tasks. Associative Group Analysis (AGA) is an inferential, indirect approach using free verbal associations for assessing cultural meanings, an underlying assumption being that…

To determine if children who have been taught to read using the i.t.a. would write stories with a vocabulary more nearly approaching the variety and extent of their oral vocabulary than would children who had been taught traditional orthography (T.O.), comparisons were made between 82 experimental (i.t.a.) and 80 control (T.O.) subjects matched on…

This study (condensed from an unpublished doctoral dissertation, "Teacher-Child Interaction: A Study of the Relationships between Child-Initiated Questions and Nursery School Teacher Behavior," Wayne State University, 1966) examines the teaching and learning processes set in motion when four-year-old children question their teachers in nursery…