This article offers our ideas on why it is important to teach our students how to speak about mathematics and some practical resources for incorporating speaking activities, helping students prepare, evaluating student presentations, and getting your department to talk about student presentations. The ideas in this article were compiled when the…

A computational framework is presented for the generation of elementary speech acts to establish conceptual alignment between a computer system and its user. This article clearly distinguishes between 2 phases of the alignment process: message interpretation and message generation. In the interpretation phase, presuppositions are extracted from…

Giving students good feedback on all their schoolwork is one of the toughest challenges every teacher faces. But here at last is a guide that helps you always know how to give the right feedback for all kinds of assignments, in every grade level and subject area. Susan M. Brookhart covers every possible aspect of the topic, including: (1) What…

Too often, academic mentoring of young faculty is seen as an individual responsibility; further, advice and help are believed to flow in only one direction--from the older to the younger faculty member. In many institutions, each junior faculty member is paired with a senior faculty member, but this type of arrangement is often fraught with…

This paper discusses the development of a measure designed to assess student acquisition of communication competencies. It reports on a study assessing 180 students who took pre- and mid-program assessment tests, and the analysis of 33 questions taken from those tests. The specific components examined included critical thinking, interpersonal,…

Based on a course that inquired into the similarities and differences between the discourse forms of argument and dialogue, this paper explores theoretical issues related to these communicative forms. The purpose of the team-taught course was for students to explore the possibility of non-polarizing public discourse. The first two sections of the…

The academy is one of the legitimate sites within our culture where values of citizenship and democracy can be encouraged through a critical pedagogy that seeks to transform oppressive social relations that are often naturalized by what Louis Althusser called ideological state apparatuses--the media, family, schools, churches and so on. Several…

Suggesting that critical thinking activities are the crux of many of the goals and objectives of communication education, this paper summarizes a sample of the literature on critical thinking. Based on the review, the paper notes that: (1) a consensus exists regarding what critical thinking is and what specific skills are acquired through varied…

The Stipulations Chart is a simple summary of some 90 tenets of communication theory, arranged in a way that allows students in basic communication courses to access those tenets which are relevant to a communication at hand. The 5-page chart organizes theoretical tenets in 2 columns; according to the communication "situation" and the…

Departments of speech communication need to strengthen their positions within their institutions now in order, not only to survive, but to contribute to the changes in higher education needed for the new millennium. To have the necessary strength, a department must be and be seen as high in quality, central to the mission of its institution, and…

For communication programs one means of developing a strong working relationship with the business and professional communities, improving program curriculum planning, and encouraging input on other departmental issues is to establish a professional advisory council. Advisory boards serve several practical purposes for a communication department.…

This annotated bibliography lists recent Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) documents (that is, documents published between 1984-1989) related to the areas of public relations and speech communications. The 34 citations include brief statements of the contents of the documents, all of which are listed in the monthly publication…

This annotated bibliography presents annotations of 61 journal articles (published from 1982 to 1991) which deal with broadcast journalism for the communication educator. The annotations are divided into five main categories: (1) curricular concerns; (2) surveys of the professional environment; (3) professional ethics; (4) technology; and (5)…

A crucial consideration in the development of equal representation in the academic, work, and civic life of the United States involves shifting away from the assumption that the traditional speech communication student is monocultural and that research methods must fit linear models of assessing teaching and learning communication competencies.…

In college-level forensic competitions, the three major weekly magazines, "U.S. News and World Report,""Time," and "Newsweek," are taking a beating. Students are purposely looking for specialized sources; they firmly believe that judges look down on the use of these weekly publications. Indeed, judges do seem to be…