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…

The use of discourse analysis in examining the classroom language interactions between English teachers and their students builds on the basic concepts of language function and language sequence. The four language functions are eliciting, informing, directing, and boundary marking (marking the divisions of discourse units). The three language…

Data on 17 first grade teachers and 305 students in 45 reading groups were used to examine the relationships between teacher behaviors, their classification of their students, and student reading achievement. The teachers were asked to rank their students on six characteristics: confidence, obedience, extroversion, good seatwork habits, teacher…

A REPORT OF A CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN SPEECH AND HEARING FOR MENTALLY RETARDED CHILDREN IS PRESENTED. THE MAIN AREAS INCLUDED ARE THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION, PROCEDURES FOR MEASURING LANGUAGE, AND SPECIAL METHODS FOR TREATMENT. SPECIFIC REPORTS GIVEN ARE--"PSYCHOLINGUISTICS IN THE STUDY OF MENTAL RETARDATION"…

IT IS NOT YET KNOWN HOW THE EXTENT OF LANGUAGE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LOWER CLASS CHILDREN AND TEACHERS WITH MIDDLE CLASS TRAINING AND, FOR THE MOST PART, WITH MIDDLE CLASS BACKGROUNDS, INFLUENCES CLASSROOM COMMUNICATION. AN EVALUATION WAS MADE OF THE EXPRESSIVE LINGUISTIC SKILLS AND SPEECH CONTENT OF CHILDREN OF DIFFERENT AGES, RACES, AND SOCIAL…

Two sessions of a kindergarten show and tell (spaced 18 days apart) were observed to compare the participant structure and the content of this shared time. Participant structure was examined in terms of turn taking, spatial arrangement, and teacher management of the event. Content was analyzed in terms of topic and cognitive level. The changes in…

A study was conducted to determine if teachers' use of transitions and additional unexplained content influenced student achievement and perception of lesson effectiveness. One hundred eleventh grade English students were randomly assigned to one of four groups defined by possible combinations of two teacher transition conditions (transitions or…

Using ethnographic methods, including participant observation and interviews, the researcher intended to study the network of relations among professional staffs of two comprehensive secondary schools in order to hypothesize about the effects of those networks on the curriculum. Neither school had a fixed four-year curriculum and both stressed…

More than 100 classroom communication observation instruments are surveyed and assessed from a communication-based perspective in this paper. In an overview, a schema designating three main types of approaches is established; they include behavioral descriptive, message functional, and cognitive/affective inferential observational categories.…

Based on an approach that analyzes the structure of educational processes in relation to the structure of its outcome, this paper develops the argument that the function that a specific environment fulfills depends critically on who is in control within the environment, and suggests how the implications of this argument might be tested. The…

This report, part of the 1972-73 Unified Science and Mathematics for Elementary Schools (USMES) evaluation project, focuses on the effect of the USMES curriculum on the organization and operation of the classroom. For the study, 30 USMES classrooms and 30 non-USMES classrooms were used. Each trained classroom observer, utilizing classroom…

Much of the important thinking that teachers do occurs during the act of teaching as well as in planning and evaluating. What teachers think about while they are teaching was the basic question addressed in this study. A model was drawn to describe the researchers' concepts of the way a teacher thinks while teaching: the teacher begins with a…

This critique of James Gallagher's Topic Classification System (TCS), a tool of categorizing teacher-pupil classroom interaction, suggests revision of the system asking for more complete analysis of the data obtained with it, but recommends its use in future investigations especially in view of its organization and the "unique elements"…

Improving the act of teaching in a classroom implies the need to study nonverbal cues and events, for many classroom phenomena serve as communicators of information and tend to either facilitate or inhibit learning. Nonverbal language, a reflection of both cultural and individual differences, includes not only the teacher's facial expressions,…

In this report, an analysis is made of the Title 1 project of the Lorain City Schools in Northern Ohio. The language growth of an experimental group of 30 disadvantaged first graders, who had spent 45 minutes each day in a special language experience classroom, was analyzed using oral language recordings and extensive language tests in order to…