Placement testing programs are generally designed to place students into courses for which they are best prepared, to reduce administrative costs due to students dropping and adding courses because of poor placement decisions, and to provide faculty with information concerning students' levels of preparation well in advance of the first day of…

A study was designed to develop a number of tests of oral proficiency and to compare those tests with the existing, highly subjective testing method used at the end of secondary school in Israel. The study used four experimental tests: the oral interview, role playing, reporting task, and group discussion. The experimental tests were analyzed for…

In a sociolinguistic study of five transcripts of high school discussions, two analyses were conducted. The first was a detailed qualitative analysis of the data, which combined paralinguistic features with three perspectives: a speech act analysis, a conversation analysis, and an interaction analysis. In the second, more quantitative analysis,…

Recent retrieval of pre-nineteenth century feminist thought provides a telling lesson in the politics of knowledge creation and control. From a feminist perspective, very little research carried out within the critical research paradigm questions the "basic assumptions, conventional wisdom, media myths and the accepted way of doing…

For language minority children who have acquired English through another culture, opportunities to learn in U.S. schools are not equal, either at the point of entry or at any time thereafter. Children's ability to participate meaningfully in school learning activities is intimately linked to cognitive and social skills that presuppose specific and…

A study was carried out to assess the French language proficiency of kindergarten students enrolled in a French early immersion program and two "classes d'accueil," that is, a special program for non-French speaking immigrant children. The particular focus of the study was to investigate whether the level of proficiency in French is…

The major goal of graduate education in speech communication is to advance knowledge about human communication through research and by training minds. Graduate education differs from undergraduate education because it emphasizes not only what we know, but how we come to know. Often, however, graduate education is just seen as being an extension of…

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a method that teachers can use to increase their communication effectiveness by matching their communication patterns with those of their students. The basic premise of NLP is that people operate and make sense of their experience through information received from the world around them. This information is…

Providing for individual differences in ability, interest, and cultural values among students, this guide contains activities, goals, objectives, and resources for teaching speech and drama to middle and junior high school students. The first section offers advice on the organization of speech and drama activities within the school curriculum,…

The 1981 summer intensive American culture course at Ohio Dominican College for students from its Japanese sister college is described. Short profiles of the two colleges are given and the general goals of the exchange program and the course are stated. Overviews including reading lists and notes about field trips, are given of the three specific…

This collection, including the proceedings of a colloquium at TESOL 1979, includes the following papers: (1) "Classification of Oral Proficiency Tests," by H. Madsen and R. Jones; (2) "A Theoretical Framework for Communicative Competence," by M. Canale and M. Swain; (3) "Beyond Faith and Face Validity: The Multitrait-Multimethod Matrix and the…

To learn more about the kind of learning that occurs when students read and receive response to their writing, a study was designed to develop an analytical system by which to describe the language of writing groups. Nine writing groups were examined, two from grade 5, four from grade 8, and three from grades 10 through 12. The data collected…

A study was conducted to assess the skill of students in identifying meanings of facial expressions in photographs used in the Facial Meaning Sensitivity Test (FMST). Subjects were 55 speech pathology students, 39 nursing students, and 36 speech communication students. The first part of the three part test asked subjects to match 10 photographs…

Intended for use as a standard textbook or a student handbook, this book serves as a reference tool for reading and writing activities. In addition to guidelines concerning reading and writing and library use, the book contains lists, tables and information usually found in an almanac. The sections are divided as follows: (1) grammatical terms,…

Recognizing the need for a multifarious approach to television, this paper provides the reader with the following multidimensional approaches to television criticism: rhetorical, dramatic, literary, cinematic, content analysis, myth, linguistics, semiotics, phenomenalism, phenomenology, interpersonal communication, public relations, image,…