This paper focuses on the wildly successful blockbuster "American Pie" teenpics, especially "American Pie 3--The Wedding". I argue that these films are specifically designed to appeal to teenage male audiences, and to provide lessons in sex and romance. Movies like this are especially important as they are experienced by far more teenagers than,…

Case study teaching is difficult in large classes, especially in fixed-seat amphitheaters. The development of audience response systems, or "clickers," for use in classrooms has opened up exciting new possibilities for creating and implementing interactive case studies, particularly in large introductory science courses.

Audience Response Technology (ART) has been widely adopted on college campuses, and prior research indicates that, on average, it receives positive evaluations from students. However, research has not yet examined how characteristics of students as learners influence their responses to ART. The current study examined aptitude for learning,…

People have enough trouble defining themselves and determining what they want in life when they operate within a single language and culture, but the job gets trickier when they live in a world of multiple lexicons, grammars, histories, cultures, audiences and social systems, where identity and perceptions vary by language context. This paper…

Genital human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is the most common sexually transmitted virus in the United States, causing genital warts, cervical cell abnormalities, and cervical cancer in women. To inform HPV education efforts, 35 focus groups were conducted with members of the general public, stratified by gender, race/ethnicity, and urban/rural…

School administrators and teachers need to recognize that most persons--including would-be censors of school-related media communications--simply do not understand the complexities germane to measuring the impact of the mass media and the specific messages transmitted to broader audiences via a variety of media channels. In particular, what most…

From a rhetorical perspective, Mendel's work and its reception elicit two important questions: (a) why were Mendel's arguments so compelling to 20th century biologists? And (b) why where they so roundly ignored by his contemporaries? The focus of this article is to examine the latter question while commenting on the former by employing several…

A compilation of papers from a joint Finnish-Russian seminar on problems of communication research, this collection presents diverse opinions and results from researchers and observers in both countries. The titles of the papers and their authors are as follows: (1) "Mass Media in the Soviet Youth's Way of Life," by V. A. Mansurov; (2)…

Taking advantage of user-friendly technology, Audience Response Systems (ARS) facilitates greater interaction with participants engaged in a variety of group activities. Each participant has an input device that permits them to express a view in complete anonymity, and the composite view of the total group appears on a public screen. ARS can then…

This paper documents the beginnings of an effort to increase the diversity of technical communication in the Pacific Northwest. An ad hoc committee of technical communicators came together for this purpose because they believe that greater diversity will help technical communicators better understand and reach audiences from a wide variety of…

A discussion of second language (L2) pronunciation looks at the ways in which native-like pronunciation can be defined. It addresses, through review of relevant literature and more detailed examination of a study by the author, these issues: how to identify native-like pronunciation; how to measure pronunciation in comparison with native speakers'…

Presenting lecture material, an in-class activity, and example transparencies, this paper is the first installment of a 3-part series of lecture/in-class activities that are used to get feedback from students on the effectiveness of teaching strategies in the area of audience analysis and adaptation in the classroom. The paper combines several…

This collection of monologues describes women's roles in theater in 1994 as being "ripe with possibility." The collection includes work from playwrights Gloria Naylor, Harold Prince, Tony Kushner, Terrence McNally, and Harold Pinter, among others. The collection contains 57 brief audition pieces for women to perform from the 1994…

Because college radio offers a less structured environment, a natural habitat is created which provides for broadcasting experimental shows such as Starship Earth, an environmental radio show on East Stroudsburg University's (Pennsylvania) college radio station, WESS 90.3 FM. Environmental problems, issues, and solutions are discussed on the show.…

Designed to be useful in the preparation of a research proposal, a culmination report of completed research, a thesis or a dissertation, this paper discusses each chapter of these various reports and offers samples of what is typically included under each subheading. Sections of the paper address the "problem" (including problem…