The primary goal of presidential crisis rhetoric appears to be the unification of the people of the United States in support of presidential policy. John F. Kennedy's crisis speaking corresponded both to his conceptions of presidential leadership and to those of the people. If the President of the United States is seen as the personification of…

This paper proposes a general principle of topic resources as a key principle of conversation. The first section of the paper offers a discussion of the notion of cohesion as a condition in which interactants perceive that their utterances are related to one another and presents the "given-new" strategy (in which the interactants…

The purposes of this study were to determine what specific types of criticism students perceive as being most helpful, whether student perceptions of helpfulness in different types of criticism vary according to individual levels of speech anxiety or exhibitionism, and whether student perceptions of helpfulness in different types of criticism vary…

The authors support the use of manual communication with the non-verbal autistic child and suggest that the exercise of manual communication may facilitate the functioning of spoken communication. Research is reviewed in the following areas: the marked peculiarities in the autistic child's perception of and attention to stimuli within or across…

This paper argues that western instructors of public speaking courses, along with those in the forensics community, can benefit from the insights offered by the eastern tradition. Examining the Indian religious text, the "Bhagavad Gita," reveals insights that can change the way message construction, audience empathy, and speaker…

Scholars and instructors of college writing may find that an examination of the literate sources behind Hugh Blair's bias for oral over written expression during the late 18th century gives perspective to their own teaching endeavors. The fact that there were many sources for Blair's own bias suggests that instead of the oral steadily giving way…

The paper examines the suprasegmental aspects of speech and focuses on the benefits of music and movement to facilitate language development in handicapped children. The paper discusses the current thinking of suprasegmental functions of intonation, stress, and rhythm as the foundation for the organization of speech communication. Strategies for…

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…

The teacher-coach involved in a contemporary speech tournament rarely, if ever, hears eloquent speeches. The forensic vigor of oratory may be restored through a form of address called the speech to stimulate or the epideictic oratory. Such speeches may include declamatory speeches, speeches of praise (or blame), or speeches for special occasions.…

Features of connected discourse that have been identified by discourse analysis may be applied to the evaluation of oral proficiency in a second language. For example, in the area of semantics, a speaker's control of the cause-result relationship involves, among other things, the ability to produce the different grammatical and lexical…

Thirty-two speech anxious college students participated in a study that examined whether four treatments that have been effective when applied separately would be equally effective when applied in combination. The treatments were (1) systemic desensitization (SD), (2) speech skills training (SST), (3) SST combined with coping skills training (CST)…

This study examined word-finding ability, measured by accuracy and latency of response, in a group of eight preschool stutterers (mean age 4.2 years) and two groups of eight nonstutterers (mean age 4.4 years) matched according to age, gender, race, and receptive vocabulary. Results indicated that, as a group, preschool children who stutter and…

The study was designed to identify the patterns, if any, that language impaired children use when employing stress in spontaneous speech. Five preschool boys with a variety of language problems involving pragmatics, syntax, semantics, and/or phonology were identified as subjects. Both had received language therapy within the last 5 years and,…

The mirror state counterplan is a straightforward form of negative refutation used in debate in which the negative team proposes that each state enact a miniature version of the affirmative plan that was to be adopted on the federal level. For example, the 1981-82 national debate proposition resolved that the federal government should…

Assuming that the forensic coach should attempt to facilitate the students' success in original speech events as well as provide a basis for understanding communication skills to be transferred to other communication settings, the coach as "educator" is crucial. While the purpose of the coach is to guide and direct a student toward an appropriate…