A study investigated the mode of communication and the type of information that best serves an organization's purposes during the orientation interviews of new employees. Preliminary interviews with ten new employees and ten experienced employees indicated task-related performances for oral or written organizational communications--structured…

Presents annotations of materials representing the range of current cross-disciplinary theories and research connecting speaking and writing. Topics range from cognitive psychology, linguistics, and rhetoric to learning theory. (HTH)

Appraises the academic reception of McLuhan's ideas. Suggests how his insights can be applied within a systematic research tradition. (The author uses his own research on the bias of speech and writing as an example.) (PD)

Examines the extent to which talking helps learning in a convergent group discussion task, where the students' goal is to construct predetermined "true justified knowledge." Analyzes instances where the same group of Malaysian students, studying on a higher education program in the United Kingdom, both succeeded and failed to arrive at the truth.…

Reports on an experiment in which 2 groups of 20 Japanese learners of English as a Second Language performed 2 monologic production tasks with and without time for planning. It was found that providing learners with time to plan their utterances results in interlanguage productions that are more complex. (64 references) (Author/VWL)

Adding German subtitles to German videos that are specifically aimed at aural comprehension development assists learners in acquiring new vocabulary and developing listening comprehension, and also facilitates the transition from reading to comprehending the spoken language. (Author/CB)

Demonstrates that critical approaches to voice, as a central manifestation of subjectivity, are currently skewed toward spoken or written phenomenon. Argues for voicing as a phenomenon that is constructed and expressed visually and orally, and as a phenomenon that has import also in being a thing heard, perceived, and reconstructed. (TB)

Describes a study that explored differences in computer-mediated communication messaging by comparing electronic mail and voice messaging used for giving directions. Highlights include a computational linguistic framework that examines differences between written and oral English, models of direction provision, and hypotheses based on preliminary…

Examines the debate initiated by Thomas J. Farrell's 1983 article, "IQ and Standard English." Suggests the importance of social class in assessing the situation of basic writers coming to college from predominately oral cultures, who are generally unprepared to write critically, follow complex lines of argument, or handle new vocabulary…

Investigated the role of context constraints on the course of predictive inferences during reading. Constraints were determined by manipulations of a context sentence that affected the extent to which an event was predictable. (Author/VWL)

Circumlocution can prevent communication breakdown and is a required function at the Advanced level on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Oral Proficiency Scale. To encourage this communicative strategy, researchers conducted a study of two intermediate college French classes: one that encouraged circumlocution and…

Examines the effects of Everyday Life Performance (ELP) (in which students speak in unison with tape recordings of naturally occurring conversations, using transcriptions as memory aids) on English-speaking college students enrolled in Spanish classes. Shows that students who have rehearsed an ELP over a six-week period reduced their errors in…

This study was designed to identify whether advanced nonnative speakers of English rely on recurrent sequences to produce fluent speech in conformance with neural network theories and symbolic network theories; participants were 6 advanced, speaking and listening university students, aged 18-37 years (their native countries being Korea, Japan,…

Composition teachers today are aware of the practice of differentiating between written and spoken language. The "basic writing" student often views written language as a nearly new language altogether. Therefore, it is increasingly important to recognize and codify not merely the disparity between speech and writing but also the…

The works of women African writers such as Bessie Head, Mariama Ba, Buchi Emecheta, and Flora Nwapa have become increasingly familiar to North American college students during the past decade, largely through their inclusion on feminist reading lists. Because the pedagogical value of these texts lies in their presumed ability to speak for African…