Students of writing can learn the principles of writing for an audience through giving speeches and lectures. This paper offers pointers to guide students in organizing and delivering oral presentations. When organizing an oral presentation, students are urged to make it short, to make the organization obvious, to make the ideas simple and vivid,…

Four hypotheses concerning the relationship between communication apprehension and four types of hand movements were formulated and tested in a study involving 74 students at an eastern university. The hand movements were emblems (hand movement not related to speech), illustrators (hand movement which accompanies speech), self-adaptors (nervous…

Course objectives for the three credit hour Lakota Oral Literature (college level English) course presented in this publication are to: perceive through the reading and hearing of Lakota legends a better understanding of the known world of the Lakota people which existed prior to white contact; understand the origin of the laws which the Lakota…

Communication theory and rhetorical theory engage in essentially the same endeavor, that of investigating the transfer of symbolic messages between human beings. The difference between the two disciplines is largely one of focus, a philosophical versus a scientific emphasis. Historically, suggestions for integrating rhetoric and communication…

This paper investigates the treatment of Japanese speech levels and styles (known as "keigo") in previous studies and discusses the problems involved. An attempt is made to reconstruct the classification of speech levels and styles in modern colloquial Japanese. Speech styles change according to age, social status, sex, and the…

This booklet was designed to serve as a stimulus and guide for those persons interested in collecting information and source material concerning the cultural and historical contributions of ethnic groups in Pennsylvania. The contents consist of three sections: suggestions for collecting, examples of Pennsylvania folklore, and an annotated…

In the exchange round, either instructors change classrooms for a round of speeches in order to offer students a new critic or else the student goes to a new classroom on the day he or she is scheduled to speak, thus facing a new audience and instructor-critic. The present study attempts to validate the exchange round as a transfer of training…

Various aspects of 145 representative oral and written compositions of six- and seven-year-old new literates are discussed in this paper. The determination to label these compositions as "primitive fiction" was made primarily on the assumption that children's first attempts at fictive narrative take on the aspects of their cultural literary…

The development of pupil behavior in the process of creative problem solving was investigated. A battery of pretests and post-tests (including written compositions, oral compositions, and open stories) was developed and administered as part of a program to develop cognitive skills. Treatment groups received instruction for 30, 60, or 90 minutes…

This study had as its purpose the investigation of visual-verbal presentation modes when used for instruction in different types of learning tasks with learners of differing mental abilities. Five parallel experiments were conducted, each for a different learning objective or task (identification, comparison, classification, generalization,…

This book, geared particularly toward beginning college and university students, treats style within the framework of general language variation, the discussion focusing chiefly on linguistic differences (both written and spoken) observed in everyday life, rather than on those found in poetry and belles lettres. The discussion is divided between…

This report considers the early stages of grammatical development in the child. It summarizes some cross-linguistic similarities in acquisition of several different types of languages: English (both white and black, lower and middle class), German, Russian, Finnish, Samoan, and Luo. With this small but diverse collection of languages and cultures…

An English class at Newtyle Secondary School, Scotland, spent four periods a week for 6 weeks on an anthological project entitled "hotel". Students assumed roles in an imaginary hotel community, wrote advertisements, brochures, and business letters, and participated in interviews, discussions, and dramatizations of specific hotel problems. Besides…

To determine whether or not students in grades 2 and 4 comprehended materials written with patterns that appear frequently in their speech better than materials written with patterns that appear infrequently, two reading comprehension tests were devised by the investigator. Subjects were all second- and fourth-grade classrooms from two similar…

A description is presented of a computer-assisted language analysis system (CALAS) which can serve as a method for isolating and displaying language utterances found in conversation. The purpose of CALAS is stated as being to deal with the question of whether it is possible to detect, isolate, and display information indicative of what is…