Offers an overview of some notable business-communication research from New Zealand and Australia, dealing with plain English in business communication, and form design and visual communication. Notes research on teaching business communication; mentions organizations that foster business-communication research in the region; and notes…

Examines the ways in which emotion labor and burnout are interwoven with issues of societal and organizational norms, power, identity, resistance, and self-control in the context of the job of cruise ship activities director. Discusses theoretical and practical implications. (NH)

Examines how listening is perceived by people in Singapore involved in insurance. Finds that all categories of respondents apart from students ranked listening as more important than writing or speaking; and all categories of respondents consider insurance agents to possess less than the desired degree of listening competence. Shows how each group…

Investigates differences between college students' reading and listening processes in conjunction with variation in oral-based or literate-based language style. Finds that: listening required less cognitive effort than reading, irrespective of language style; listeners and readers alike best comprehended oral-based discourse; and that reading was…

Interviews 8th- and 12th-grade adolescent tobacco users, as part of a larger study on adolescents' reasons for tobacco use. Finds that: students perceive school systems to be hypocritical and to be sending contradictory messages regarding the use of tobacco; and the reward/punishment structure of public school systems may not be effective in…

Investigates types of organizational rumors, their prevalence and effects, effectiveness of rumor management strategies, and associated psychological and situational variables. Finds 3 distinct dimensions of rumor effects: external ramifications (bad press), internal attitudes (lowered morale), and internal behaviors (increased absenteeism). (NH)

Presents one of a set of five analyses that all examine the same data; the discourse of a problem-based learning group in medicine. Offers an overview of the five analyses, including how they differ. Includes a transcription of the six-minute data segment featuring a group of second-year medical students and a faculty tutor/coach discussing a…

Contributes to scholarship advancing the understanding of human communication by elaborating a theoretical framework for understanding the synthesis of self-definition and social advocacy in social movement autobiographies. Uses insights from Kenneth Burke and posits that in a rhetorically effective movement autobiography, form enables the…

Offers information designed to provide a good starting place for searches on the World Wide Web regarding research and teaching in the field of communication. Highlights some of the most useful and time saving tools currently available. (PA)

Surveys members of the Association of Language Excellence Centers in the United Kingdom and language training providers in Ireland to assess the level of language and cultural awareness. Finds the percentage of British and Irish companies carrying out an internal foreign language audit is disturbingly low, and the number of companies wishing to…

Compared production of gestures, signs, and words by a child simultaneously acquiring sign language and speech to that of a group of children exposed only to speech. Found that exposure to sign language influences the extent to which the manual modality of expression is used for communicative purposes but does not alter the rate or course of…

Focuses on teasing as a form of verbal aggression in the educational environment. Examines the relationships between undergraduate students' recollections of receiving peer teasing during their junior and senior high school years and students' self-esteem and affect for school. Yields limited correlations between peer teasing and self-esteem, and…

Prompts computer-mediated communication scholars to exploit the possibilities offered by new, powerful, and flexible analytic tools for collecting, organizing, and exploring digital data. Summarizes a case study on an Italian computer conference. Concludes with a short outline of the new graphical computer-mediated communication environments and…

Explores, taking an issues management approach to new technologies, the dialogs that can occur on the World Wide Web. Examines the public issues debate between Shell Oil UK and Greenpeace which engaged in a town meeting regarding the best financial and environmental solution to the decommissioning of the Brent Spar. (PA)

Reports results of a study in which 72 African-American college students listened to and evaluated a tape-recorded excerpt of a speech in two versions, one in Ebonics and one in Standard English. Finds students rated the speaker who used Standard English as more credible (i.e. , more competent and having a strong character) and more sociable than…