With so many devices and a plethora of tools to talk to others remotely, oral communication is now overwhelmingly on display like never before, and speaking is becoming more dominant than it used to be. Given this context, it's time for education to stop focusing primarily on reading and writing. Most students don't receive adequate preparation to…

It is essential that chemists develop strong oral communication skills. At the undergraduate level, this requires students to build confidence in their ability to speak without a script and to utilize graphics effectively. We have developed a short activity that helps address common presentation issues such as overuse of text and reading verbatim…

For most students at my university, classroom experience alone was the choice for formally developing speaking skills. My idea was to provide students with recurring authentic audience experience, attending to the audience dimension outlined by Derryberry (1989) as a critical requirement of public speaking pedagogy. Through research, a new idea…

Courses: Advanced Public Speaking, Argumentation Theory. Objectives: This activity aims to enhance students' ability to make statistics compelling and persuasive.

Courses: This activity could be used in a basic public-speaking course to demonstrate messaging and the development of the three pillars of public speaking: content, organization, and delivery. In a basic communication course, this activity would help illustrate the process of communication (sender, receiver, feedback, channel, etc.). A mass…

Oral presentations are a common practice in foreign language classes, often used to assess students' speaking skills. Usually, the presentations are delivered by students in front of the class, often with PowerPoint slides or Prezi as support. However, frequently the audience does not engage with the presentation and thus, the benefits of this…

Courses: Public Speaking, Business and Professional Communication, Persuasion, or any other skill-based oral communication course. Objectives: Students will practice the development and demonstration of persuasive arguments in this single-class social judgment theory activity to improve their ability to change resistant audience attitudes.

Courses: Disaster Day (DD) is a single-class activity designed for public speaking classrooms, but could also be applied to courses addressing small group communication. Objectives: DD integrates fundamental skills of the basic speech course, fosters participation through group work, and introduces new concepts and skills. By the end of the…

Courses: Public Speaking. Objectives: This semester-long service-learning activity examines access to affordable healthy food as a social justice issue, using critical ethnography as a framework to help students understand the link between activism and public speaking skills. After completing the project, students will be able to: (1) develop a…

Orators of folk literature and nursery rhymes entertain, inform, and persuade their audiences through the straightforward plots in those genres. Because nursery rhymes recitations usually happen in groups, they help children acquire the mechanics of oral communication and promote communal bonding. Although nursery rhymes have a simpler form than…

Despite the importance of public speaking skills for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students' academic and professional success, few EAP textbooks incorporate authentic, professional speech models. Thus, many EAP instructors have turned to TED talks for dynamic speech models. Yet a single TED talk may be too long for viewing in class and may…

The purpose of this paper is to highlight current U.S. Supreme Court precedents regarding public employee speech on matters of public concern, and how those precedents are being applied by lower federal courts to public school administrators. Surveying the current legal landscape reveals a heightened vulnerability for school administrators…

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…

This article discusses practical ways to incorporate theater concepts into the ESL classroom. The notion of a theater ensemble lends itself well to group work in language learning. I have used my experience auditioning, participating in theater games, and improv techniques to encourage second language learning through public speaking, group…

This paper presents a new course, Radionavigation Systems, whose laboratory and theoretical components complement each other to enhance student learning. Radionavigation skills and knowledge are taught by means of various instructional methods, and the laboratory successfully merges hands-on learning using specific instrumentation and software…