In a study that sought to identify the gains in English oral communication skills of Spanish speaking learning disabled students in the elementary schools, the Basic Inventory of Natural Language (BINL) and the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery (WLPB) were administered to two groups of students aged 8 to 12 years: an experimental group of 20…

Qualitative case study is used to explore the conceptualization of "teacher credibility" and to examine the effect of race upon perceptions of credibility. Non-participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and open-ended questionnaires reflect methods used to collect data from two social science professors and their students. Both…

This paper offers a brief description of a course on intrapersonal communication with a home page approach using the World Wide Web. The paper notes that students use the home page for completing assignments, readings, posting responses, self-evaluation testing, research, and displaying some of their papers for the course. The paper contains…

The Oral and Written Communication (OWC) course at Ngee Ann Polytechnic was originally intended to equip students with occupational skills (e.g., report- and letter-writing, public speaking) but has expanded to be a course aimed at helping third-year mechanical engineering students to develop third-year project reports. This has been done through…

Cochlear implants have tremendous potential to aid profoundly deaf students in achieving competency in using spoken communication. Children with cochlear implants do not perceive sound in the same way as normal hearing individuals do, and realizing their potential requires long-term intensive instruction and the utilization of a multidisciplinary…

A project was implemented which attempted to reduce the number of children from kindergarten through second grade whose counseling services are terminated prematurely, or who receive suboptimal counseling services because their active participation could not be engaged in the evaluation and counseling processes. Seven individual sessions were held…

This report describes a "culturally contexted" conversation analysis approach to the study of naturally occurring speech in supervisory conferences. The supervisors and teachers were participants in a graduate program for beginning teachers, and the conference's purpose was supervisory evaluation of teachers' classroom performances. Ethnographic…

An approach to foreign language instruction was worked out to meet the needs of high school students who were preparing to participate in an international exchange program with French students. The approach uses a combination of the notional-functional syllabus and the regular grammar and vocabulary lessons. Examples in French are provided…

Efforts by Christian colleges to integrate faith and learning in communication courses through conscious and direct planning are based on several questionable assumptions: that faith must be learned through the intellect, that all evangelical Christians share the same theological roots, and that interpersonal communication can be taught like any…

Music awakens interest during language learning, and use of song can stimulate students to greater oral participation. Songs are universally enjoyed, break the day's monotony, and make repetition enjoyable. They also allow linguistic exercise in a noncompetitive situation and offer a more authentic linguistic experience than most classroom…

Recent literature on individual differences in verbal ability indicates that people demonstrating high verbal comprehension are quicker and more accurate in identifying lexical items, as well as more rapid in parsing sentences. They are not, however, more sensitive to the general gist of a passage, and thus do not respond to priming from context…

Providing insight into how learning assistance practitioners can effect positive change in the ability of their students to speak and to listen, this book presents the experiences of communication professionals who have succeeded in improving students' skills. The first five chapters describe a variety of instructional methods useful in teaching…

The promotion of literacy among minority groups depends in part upon educational and sociolinguistic discourse analysis. As a contribution to that effort, the present study provides data on the narrative in the language of Mexican-American adults by gathering and analyzing personal narratives produced in both English and Spanish. These narratives…

Reliability data suggest that, although there are many problems, it is feasible to systematically evaluate a student's analytic and persuasive competence in free oral argumentation. The first part of the paper describes the contexts within which the evaluation project took place. Specifically discussed are the five areas of analysis on which the…

Involving students in an active study of dialect differences will enhance their own self awareness and their knowledge and understanding of cultural diversity. (JH)