First-year students at many universities find themselves in new communities, with little understanding of how their new university, city, academic, or career communities function. Developing a student's sense of community can have long-term benefits. Using the theme of "Community" in the basic public speaking course provides students with…

Graduate capabilities are an essential aspect of undergraduate development in higher education. Accordingly, La Trobe University's "Design for learning" has identified particular university-wide graduate capabilities and required all faculties to explicitly embed these in their curricula. The Faculty of Law and Management developed an approach to…

Objectives: Students will demonstrate research, decision making, team building, and public speaking skills, while applying issues management and crisis communication concepts in a realistic setting. Courses: Introduction to Public Relations, Public Relations Cases, Crisis Communication.

This brief provides an overview of the knowledge and skills that administrators need in order to support and supervise teachers of adult English language learners. It begins with a review of resources and literature related to teacher supervision in general and to adult ESL education. It continues with information on the background and…

Teachers may resist the notion of teaching as a performance but his or her voice, gestures, and movement in the classroom can help or harm student attentiveness. Strong skills in voice and movement can help illuminate a teacher's questions and ideas for students, drawing attention to what matters, holding their attention through a long class, and…

Describes a course in commercial copywriting for electronic media in which students must also present orally their copy to the class to drive home two points: (1) the writing has to sell products, and (2) the writer has to sell the spot or campaign to the client or employers. (HTH)

Focusing on public speaking as a major instructional tool for teachers, this paper contains suggestions for more effective lecturing. In the introduction, classroom communication is analyzed according to four moves: structuring, soliciting, responding, and reacting. The paper then discusses four problems in studying learning from meaningful verbal…

Describes an exercise used in business communication courses that uses controversial business news to provoke discussion and build critical thinking as well as help students to develop writing and speaking skills as they prepare to face the communications implications of workplace controversies and crises. (SR)

James Kinneavy's "Theory of Discourse," already being used as the model for the writing assignments in the curriculum at St. Joseph's College, can also be used as the model for listening and speaking assignments. This proposed project would incorporate the following four-step procedure: (1) determining what is necessary in preparing…

Describes a series of courses, held at the Oxford University Language Teaching Centre, which were designed to improve the spoken English of overseas members of the University in academic seminars. The courses used a series of cassette recordings that featured authentic unscripted interviews with contemporary specialists and writers. (SED)

Upon the request of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), Florida State University (FSU) is required to enact a program designed to graduate students with a certain degree of oral communication competency. While communication majors and minors are required to enroll in a public speaking course, no student at FSU has the option…

Describes a training program to improve graduate psychology students' seminar presentation skills. Outlines the behavior modeling and interviews with professors used in the training. Concludes that the project was evaluated favorably by professors in other courses where students made presentations and by the students themselves. (CFR)

This paper describes a faculty resource team in the Bradley University (Illinois) Department of Industrial Engineering that works with student project teams in an effort to improve their visualization and oral presentation skills. Students use state of the art technology to develop and display their visuals. In addition to technology, students are…

Recognizing that each student is different in terms of communication apprehension and needed skills, the confidence model attempts to provide instruction in anxiety reduction and skill development, combining the features of both the behavior therapy and the rhetoritherapy theories of communication apprehension. The rational emotive therapy used in…

Describes a course called "Varieties of Speaking and Writing" at Anglia Polytechnic University; the course teaches language skills through study of extracts from literary and non-literary writing. Addresses fundamental pedagogical issues: how to improve undergraduate writing skills, how to train and assess speaking skills, and how to…