This article details an activity intended for use in a course with a unit on effective listening, including listening courses, public speaking, and interpersonal communication. Students will explain the importance of effective and active listening for a target audience by producing an infomercial for a product or service which they design.

One September morning, the author woke as a teacher--an international teaching assistant (ITA), to be exact--at a California State University (Cal State). As a twenty-five-year-old teaching assistant, he had the opportunity to teach hybrid public speaking classes that were designed for the American Culture and Language Program (ACLP), which turned…

In many middle schools and high schools, students are presenting projects orally. However, most lack appropriate speaking skills. More importantly, they lack teacher and peer support. Most experts agree that speaking skills are essential for success. However, much anxiety surrounds public speaking and it is often cited as one of the top 10 fears.…

This article offers eight recommendations for teaching artist training programs. These recommendations based on the findings of the Ohio State Based Collaborative Initiative report may be useful to arts and education organizations as they design training experiences for teaching artists developing arts-integrated workshops for teachers; they may…

Public speaking anxiety (PSA) is a common phobia. Although cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is preferred, difficulties arise with the exposure component (lack of therapist control, patient's inability to imagine, self-flooding, loss of confidentiality resulting from public exposure). Virtual reality CBT (VRCBT) enables a high degree of therapist…

The assumption that foreign language learners experience a high level of anxiety mainly when faced with speaking activities implies that research should focus on those learners prone to anxiety over that skill. Despite not being widely investigated, foreign language writing anxiety also seems to be a concern for a large number of students. Drawing…

Engineering communication studies indicate the importance of oral presentations as an indispensable component of workplace oral communication activities; however, since there is limited literature regarding stakeholder perceptions of effective presentation skills and attributes in technical oral presentations or final year engineering project…

This article presents a class activity where students work in dyads to select an artifact related to a course topic and, using this artifact, develop discussion questions to engage their classmates. This cultural artifact assignment is intended to, in part, answer John Dewey's call to cultivate connections between subject matter and life…

Debating has been around for a long time, with some pretty spectacular results. Look at Socrates, who was put to death in 399 BCE for corrupting the youth of Athens; his accusers could not forgive him for incessantly questioning their beliefs and making "the worse appear the better cause." More recently, debating has morphed into a sport for the…

This article provides a course overview of English 304 & Communications 250: Professional Rhetorics. This course was a pilot project instituted at Clemson University in spring of 2008. The project integrally linked English 304 (Business Writing) and Communications 250 (Public Speaking), requiring the same students to be enrolled in both 3…

In this paper, we employ cultural sociology and Braj Kachru's model of World Englishes as theoretical and analytical tools for considering English as a form of capital necessary for widely disseminating research findings from local networks of practice to the greater science education research community. We present a brief analysis of recent…

Clear, coherent and trusted, this book is the perfect guide to the main social research methods in use today. The much anticipated Third Edition of Clive Seale's bestselling title further expands its coverage to provide an authoritative introduction to all of the social research methods used to analyze qualitative and quantitative data. Written by…

Educational blogs have drawn the growing interest of researchers and language teachers due to the user-friendly interfaces as well as the powerful archiving features. The purpose of the current study is two-fold: (1) to examine the effectiveness of extensive speaking practice on speaking performance in voice blogs, and (2) to examine learners'…

An outline of the background to the provision of psychological evidence within legal settings will be provided, with attention to formal and quasi-court settings (e.g., tribunals). Key points of relevance to psychologists and to educational psychologists in particular will be illustrated, including guidelines for defendable written and oral…

Parody and related forms of political humor are essential resources for sustaining democratic public culture. They do so by exposing the limits of public speech, transforming discursive demands into virtual images, setting those images before a carnivalesque audience, and celebrating social leveling while decentering all discourses within the…