Designed to lend support to South Carolina's mandated language arts goals and objectives and to provide a tool flexible enough to meet the needs of a changing society, this curriculum guide describes an integrated sequence of instruction in reading, writing, listening, speaking, and observing from kindergarten through grade 12. After a brief…

A practicum study designed to address the problem of inadequate language development skills in first-grade children was conducted. Specifically, efforts were directed toward developing and implementing a specialized instructional program to remediate students' deficiencies in listening comprehension, basic concept skills, classification skills,…

Communication between individuals from different cultures can fail simply because of the culturally-oriented assumptions that speakers make about one another's responses. The higher rate of discipline referrals among African-American males involves behavior that is related to cultural and communicative issues. In an effort to build their…

This paper describes the Oral Communication Program (OCP) developed at Radford University (Virginia) and discusses key components for a proposal to acquire funding from public or private granting agencies. Analogous to the writing-across-the-curriculum movement, the OCP encourages faculty in all academic areas to incorporate oral communication…

The communications and international business program at Coastline Community College in California focuses on the use of curricula experiments and instructional innovations to update general education and vocational courses to meet the training needs of international business people in the area. Local business executives whose companies were…

The syllabus for a college-level speech course at California State University, Los Angeles, designed to help students of English as a second language bring their pronunciation closer to mainstream English is presented. While the primary focus is on pronunciation improvement, the course also provides functional communication practice. The students…

A study operationalized and measured the construct of communicator motivation, defined as an affective tendency to approach and become involved in communication, as part of an effort to clarify the concept and to begin validation of a new scale to measure it. The study addressed two specific motives: concern for promoting self and concern for…

Although student interest is greater than ever, college forensics programs are limited in their expansion by budget considerations that restrict travel. However, with reasonable effort and perseverance new programs can be initiated or existing ones expanded to integrate the educational community and the community at large into a forensics program.…

Drawing from recent research, this paper focuses on communication games and activities that can be used to teach speaking and listening skills ("referential communication skills"). Following a brief review of the research, the paper offers a set of eight criteria for evaluating curriculum materials intended to teach speaking and listening, and…

Speech teachers in small colleges often feel frustrated because of their course load and other heavy demands made on their time. Because their departments are small, they have few colleagues in their discipline to work with, and this--plus time constraints--makes it difficult for them to remain professionally active. One way they can extricate…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The seven titles deal with the following topics: (1) the effects of a seven-hour communication training program on participant utilization of six components of communication style; (2) communication skills and cognitive processes in…

Intended for college-level basic writers, this booklet integrates training in selected oral communication activities with writing instruction in order to improve students' academic writing. The first section discusses oral communication theory, emphasizing the underlying rhetorical abilities of invention, audience adaptation, and argumentation, to…

The curriculum guide was developed to serve hearing impaired children at the Kendall Demonstration School elementary/middle school in Washington, D.C. An introductory section explains the philosophy/rationale of the language arts curriculum which emphasizes the development of spoken, signed, or written language. The next section offers suggestions…

The goal of instruction in mainstream dialect (MD) acquisition should be to expand students' oral communication skills to include skills needed for academic and economic success, thereby making alternate dialect speakers bidialectic. This implies recognizing students' home dialect as a valid linguistic system and a part of their identity. Although…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 15 titles deal with the following topics: (1) verbal interpersonal communication between community volunteers and prisoners; (2) pharmacist-patient communication skills; (3) communication attachment; (4) the definition,…