The University of Northern Iowa is fully committed to the ideas of equal opportunity, cultural diversity and sensitivity. The Oral Communication Basic Course Program in the Communication Studies Department is fully committed to teaching students to appreciate and actively use principles of cultural diversity and sensitivity in their daily lives.…

How do people know what gender they are? An action or physical characteristic becomes meaningful only when interpreted through its cultural framework. The difference between male and female communication styles has recently engaged national attention, and the frameworks that men and women use to understand the world have been observed by scholars.…

Intercollegiate forensics has been shown to provide extensive added value to its participants regardless of whether the student stresses debate, individual events, or both. Of the individual event genres, only the limited preparation events have not been distinguished by their content goals. Most textbooks consider impromptu and extemporaneous…

The Department of Human Communication at James Madison University initiated a program of assessment for majors in September 1990. A committee decided to focus in the first year on the cognitive core of information which students hopefully would have mastered, and, with faculty input, established a 30-item list of objectives for graduates of the…

In response to the nationwide trend toward increased financial pressures and growing demands by state legislatures for accountability, several large universities (including Indiana University) have adopted various forms of "responsibility center budgeting" (RCB), which has fiscal implications for programs in speech communication and…

DACUM, an acronym for Developing A Curriculum, is a standardized curriculum development process used primarily in community colleges across the United States. DACUM results provide a valid national database that can: (1) further justify the study of speech communication in most academic curricula; and (2) help define the nature of the basic speech…

Artificial criteria included in speech evaluation forms in the basic communication classroom to assess students' communication competencies fail to reflect what is known about communication as a transaction and about communication competence. Communication competence is most commonly defined from the action perspective which focuses on the…

Speaking across the curriculum programs are a readily accessible venue for the assessment of oral communication competence and in some instances are already being used for such purposes. While so far the implementation of simple holistic judgments for quality assurance purposes has emerged as one practical procedure, further exploration should…

This paper attempts to show that certain structural relations that contribute to creating text in spoken and written monologue also bind segments together in conversation. Methodology is based on a model of text as consisting of sequences of a problem-solution structure. Analysis of texts from 12 purpose-oriented telephone conversations focuses on…

A replication study tested functional theory utilizing untrained full-fledged groups. One hundred forty undergraduate students who were enrolled in a small group communication course at a large midwestern university participated in small group discussions analyzing a plagiarism case used in an original study by R. Y. Hirokawa. Results indicated…

One of the challenges of a communication instructor is how to initiate the discussion of ethics in the university classroom. The classic film, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," has proved a useful tool for initiating discussion of ethical decision-making in leadership. This film presents a young and idealistic leader of boy ranger clubs…

This paper offers three experiental assessment procedures for speaking/listening competencies. First, five important elements in assessing speaking and listening are presented: defiinition; the establishment of a specific purpose for the assessment; determining what is being measured; identifying the type of communication being assessed; and a…

Focusing on the developmental nature of organizational communication competence, this literature review draws on the communication competence and organizational assimilation literatures to propose models of the process of developing organizational communication competence. The paper's first section presents an overview of research exploring…

Designed to aid school districts, administrators, and teachers in meeting the Idaho Department of Education Speech Communication requirement, this pamphlet first defines the learning-teaching environment for the speech communication course, describes who should teach it, and justifies its inclusion in the school curriculum. The main part of the…

Fluency can be defined in terms of intelligibility and effectiveness. For learners of English as a foreign language, fluency includes some degree of accuracy in phonological, syntactic, and semantic terms. It is a quality of speech that is produced in novel situations where what is said and how it is said cannot be predicted. To clarify the…