A study tested two hypotheses concerning credibility (an auditor's attitude toward a source) and arousal (attention level of an auditor): (1) the effect on learning of credibility will interact with the effect of the vigilance level of auditors, and (2) under conditions of low arousal, auditors will learn significantly more from a message if it is…

Perspectives on and methods in second language teaching have changed rapidly during the past 10 years. So also have the role and function of the language laboratory and the laboratory instructor. One area of concern, listening, has been somewhat neglected; generally it has been taught toward the end of increasing speaking proficiency. A review of…

A study was conducted to test the empirical merit of R. M. Chisholm's and T. D. Feehan's proposed typology of deception: (1) commission versus omission (lies of commission are those where the liar contributes causally to the receiver's believing the lie, perhaps by telling the falsehood; lies of omission would occur if the liar could have…

Competency-based education can be a viable tool for demonstrating accountability in speech communication instruction. The objectives of speech communication instruction tend to be based more upon the content than upon the everyday communication needs of the students. Rather than continue the approach of basing instruction on assumptions of what…

A study examined the relative prestige of university speech communication departments based on the published output of their graduates. All issues of nine major speech communication journals were examined for the period 1971 to 1981. Approximately 200 institutions were represented in the 3,771 entries in the data base; 90 percent of the authors…

Recognizing that each student is different in terms of communication apprehension and needed skills, the confidence model attempts to provide instruction in anxiety reduction and skill development, combining the features of both the behavior therapy and the rhetoritherapy theories of communication apprehension. The rational emotive therapy used in…

Recently there has been a renewed international interest in direct oral proficiency measures such as the oral interview. There has also been a growing awareness among some language testing specialists that all proficiency tests must be subjected to construct validation. It seems that the high face validity of oral interviews tends to cloud and…

The development of relative clauses in child speech was investigated using an elicited production task instead of spontaneous speech samples. In an elicited production task, the context is manipulated so that a complex sentence must be used for communication. Thirty-six English speaking children from 3 to 5 years old were provided with contexts…

Two ideas about language as communication that can guide teachers' thinking about language, their observations of their pupils' language, and their curriculum planning activities are that (1) language is a social enterprise, and (2) language provides the means of distancing oneself from the here and now. When teachers make use of these two ideas,…

A survey was conducted to update previous rankings of speech communication doctoral programs. Subjects were a random selection of every sixth name on the Speech Communication Association (SCA) membership list, and members of the SCA who have been the first authors of journal articles in the SCA journals in the past 10 years. In addition to…

A study examined the grading patterns in basic public speaking and communication courses. It was hypothesized that female students would receive higher grades in basic performance and nonperformance communication courses than would male students. The grades for one academic quarter in two nonperformance communication courses and one public…

Surveys, content analyses, and laboratory experiment/judgment task strategies continue to be the dominant research methods used in mass communication research. Some researchers, however, are advocating method triangulation--the use of at least two and as many as five methods within the same study. A manual and computer search of several databases…

Because research in speech communication is predominantly the study of human behavior, a major goal of researchers in the field is to provide sound communication propositions about people in general or specific groups of people. A review of recent speech communication research reported in journals reveals that researchers in the social and…

No teaching method is more widely used and yet more strongly criticized than the lecture. Yet, an examination of more than 40 basic public speaking textbooks reveals that lecturing is seldom mentioned. There are, perhaps, several reasons for this omission. For example, authors of textbooks might feel that (1) material on lecturing duplicates their…

In exploring the role and status of the ethics that govern communication research, the two parts of this paper examine the practices of researchers and the role of deception in their methodology and conclusions, and the role of communication research as a whole to the society that it is supposed to benefit. At the end of both discussions are…