Sources specifically designed for use in teaching a course on sex roles and communication have been compiled to provide suggested materials, class exercises, and assignments for units on awareness, assessment, and action. The awareness exercises are designed to give students insights into the ways in which sex-role identity affects self-concepts,…

An oral screening test administered by an adult to a five-year-old child was transcribed and analyzed. The test was chosen as an example of a referential communication task that is also a social communication task. The analysis demonstrates that a participant in communication assumes that the other participants are employing strategies for…

The specific concern in this study is to consider the nature, social significance, and consequences of syntactic variation in the question forms used by judges when taking guilty pleas from criminal defendents. Nine judges from a court of general jurisdiction in Arizona were observed and tape-recorded while presiding over several procedures that…

Kenneth Burke, whose positions have served as the basis for countless research projects in speech communication, believes that people are actors acting out life in the social drama with the purpose of achieving the ultimate good. Considering speakers as actors centers attention on the analysis of individuals in terms of their actions as actors and…

Ethical concepts, when taught, should be operational and placed in context. Applying the operational criterion is tough enough in a single culture; however, in a course in intercultural communication, difficulties are multiplied. The teacher of an intercultural communication classroom should embrace the position that many ethical principles are…

Since the elderly are a significant population of health care consumers, health care professionals should be trained to deliver health services to them as effectively and humanely as possible. While the primary tool for delivery of health care services to people is human communication, there is evidence that the communication between the providers…

This paper considers three issues related to the philosophical struggle between journalism and speech communication departments in developing a public relations curriculum. The three issues are as follows: (1) the definition of public relations, with an emphasis on persuasion; (2) the design of a public relations curriculum, using the one at…

Objectives and learning activities are delineated for a one-quarter, six-credit course offered by University College of the University of Cincinnati to familiarize students with the written and oral communication skills they will need on the job and to conduct a successful job search. A brief course description is presented first, revealing that…

This paper assesses certain properties of human mental processes by focusing on the tactics utilized in perceiving speech signals. Topics discussed in the paper include the power spectrum approach to fluctuations and noise, with particular reference to biological structures; "l/f-like" fluctuations in speech and music and the functioning of a…

Speaking and writing should be taught together as they both are concerned with the communication model that includes a speaker, a listener, and a subject and the way these elements affect each other. In speaking, it is clear that invention is a public process depending on the listener's or receiver's active participation in the creation of…

Kenneth Burke's 20 ratios permit the rhetorical critic to make very specific statements about the discourse under analysis and open the way for analytic speculation. The ratio method permits the critic to describe and understand the specific qualities of practical ethical dispute. Burkian ratios were employed to analyze the justificatory rhetoric…

A survey of college speech communication programs was conducted to determine the size and scope of the combined study of communication and law. Data from 117 of 200 randomly sampled institutions were used for analysis. A substantial majority of the institutions offered or were planning to offer courses concerned with the relationship between…

Two experiments, based on the semantic differential technique, were designed to measure the tolerance level of bilingually marked English in a functional bilingual's speech. In the first experiment, marked syntactic cues were rated by different groups of judges as generally indicative of non-bilingualism, although on the whole they were not…

The first article in this journal issue offers a diffuse definition of instructional communication, the theme of the issue, and reviews literature that points out the ill-defined parameters of communication and the classroom. The following articles discuss the development of a rhetorical perspective on teaching, the parental role in facilitating…

Presented is a dissertation that demonstrates the importance of health education in the satisfactory accomplishment of the tasks of an Environmental Health Officer (EHO) or others similarly engaged in the same field. The rationale supporting the argument for the inclusion of a course of health education in the training program of environmentally…