This research is set in the active learning context and focuses on students' intentions for presentation. Following research that suggests teachers' teaching intentions and approaches are influenced by conceptions of teaching, we tested if a similar relationship exists between students' conceptions of teaching and their intentions for…

Communication instructors have long insisted on the importance of audience adaptation. But they have said less about (a) the dimensions along which adaptation might proceed or (b) how a student might learn the art of adapting. In this article, I contribute toward addressing these two deficiencies. I suggest a dimension for adaptation - the value…

Academic communication crucially involves readers, or hearers, buying into an argument. The audience has to be hooked, involved and led to a desired conclusion, and this is perhaps no more urgent than in a Three Minute Thesis presentation (3MT). In this competitive environment, doctoral students present their research using only one static slide…

Audience analysis is essential for creating successful messages across communication fields. The audience persona is an effective tool for understanding the characteristics and needs of a target audience. Through this unit activity, students experience the process of persona development, build skills in data collection and analysis, and gain…

Courses: Public Speaking, Interpersonal Communication, Organizational Communication, Introduction to Communication Studies, Business Communication. Objectives: The goal for this activity is not only to provide students with an understanding of their initial, derived, and terminal credibility when relating a personal, edifying story but also to…

Basic Course Directors (BCDs) are typically expected to assess course learning outcomes, but few formal guidelines and resources exist for new BCDs. As one part of a larger, multi-methodological assessment tool development project, this manuscript maps existing quantitative measures onto the six essential competencies and associated learning…

Courses: Introduction to Communication, Public Speaking, Persuasion, Business Communication. Objective: This activity increases students' understanding of audience adaptation and improves their ability to adapt presentations to specific audiences.

Most forms of contemporary preaching elevate the role of the listeners, who are seen as co-constructors of the sermon. This article investigates how preachers may respond to a call from homiletics to "turn-to-the-listener" through their deployment of metadiscourse, operationalized as a framework for understanding preaching not primarily…

The purpose of this study is to examine Korean students' anxiety in classroom presentations in tertiary educational context through classroom observation, self-reported questionnaire and semi-structured interview. In the stage of classroom observation, the potential responsivities relating with anxiety were explored through the analysis of…

A fundamental challenge that all public speakers face is getting and keeping the attention of audiences. Because audiences absorb large amounts of talk with little chance of taking the floor, the potential for inattentiveness and boredom is significant. In conversational interchanges, the brief duration of speaking turns and regular transfers of…

Just as WAC pedagogy and writing studies both stress the ways that writing and communication practices can act as both heuristics and products of genre-based, discipline- specific knowledge, in much the same way, performance, too, can be used as a heuristic and as a product and should be more fully explored in WAC theory and pedagogy. This article…

Each Air Force recruiter is formally trained in public speaking and the art of salesmanship or persuasion. These recruiters communicate to thousands of high school students each year through presentations in classrooms, auditoriums and other venues as part of their assigned duties. Persuasive presentations are public speaking events specifically…

In communication courses, instructors frequently define the term "anecdote," explore the various types of anecdotes, and then encourage students to use anecdotes in their speeches. However, instructors do not often spend time teaching students "how" to construct memorable anecdotes. As a result, many students present weak anecdotes or choose not…

Public speakers believe their nervousness is more apparent to others than is actually the case, a phenomenon known as the illusion of transparency. Study 1, in which participants delivered a public speech to an audience, provided evidence of this phenomenon. Despite this, a substantial minority of participants (36%) thought that the audience would…

This article offers a way of using the theory of audience design--how speakers position different audience groups as main addressees, overhearers, or bystanders--for written discourse. It focuses on main addressees, that is, those audience members who are expected to participate in and respond to a speaker's utterances. The text samples are…