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)

Addresses concerns when a college-level course utilizes a number of instructors and sections. Notes the importance of the various sections receiving essentially the same educational experience. Describes section variation trends. Discusses use of the computer assisted speech evaluation software at Texas Christian University. Recommends the use of…

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,…

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…

The keeping of journals by students in the basic speech course is the focus of this paper, which is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines the benefits of journal use to students and teachers and points out that three types of learning can thus be encouraged: the development of thinking skills, personal growth, and content learning. It also…

A study was conducted to determine if changes in a student's writing and speaking skills over the period of a semester could be measured reliably and to measure what changes, if any, occur in these skills over this period. A pretest-posttest design employing the speech and writing portions of ACT's College Outcome Measures Project was used to…

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…

No teaching method is more widely used and yet more strongly criticized than the lecture. Yet, an examination of more than 40 basic public speaking textbooks reveals that lecturing is seldom mentioned. There are, perhaps, several reasons for this omission. For example, authors of textbooks might feel that (1) material on lecturing duplicates their…

A study examined the information processing construct of the speech rating error paradigm. Specifically, it tested the hypotheses that (1) attitude valence and dogmatism would interact in such a way that low dogmatic raters would show a positive trait error on the content traits material and analysis; (2) low dogmatic raters would evaluate a…

This part of a series of reports on forensic programs in this issue gives data about how forensics is thought of by the speech communication profession. (CH)

(Text is in Chinese.)

Teaching a unit on effective briefing techniques early in a basic speech class can develop in the student a sense of time consciousness, verbal conciseness, objectivity, appreciation for documentation, and logical organization. Briefing in this sense is a type of informative speech in which selected and compressed information is presented to one's…

In a survey of commercial braodcasters, 80% of the respondents felt that university communications majors seeking on-the-air, nonnews jobs were unqualified for their chosen profession. Because teachers of oral interpretation possess the performance expertise that broadcasters need, they must be more actively involved in teaching broadcast…

This report, covering the period from July 1 to December 31, 1974, is one of a regular series on the status and progress of studies concerning the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications. The manuscripts in this report include: speech perception, speech recognition through spectrogram matching, phonetic…