Analyzes the oral language patterns of students from working class backgrounds, revealing a preference for practical efficiency of communication over grammatical correctness or precision. By school standards, their spoken narrations are confused, incoherent, and incorrect, leading to cultural misunderstandings, mutual incomprehension, and…

Clinical surgery faculty (n=78) evaluated videotaped simulated surgery student oral examinations. Results showed that regardless of the content of students' responses, evaluators were strongly influenced by how well students communicated. Evaluators preferred a moderate response rate and direct eye contact over a slower response rate and indirect…

Two theoretical schools have emerged within the field of communication focusing on the alleviation of dysfunctional communications such as speech anxiety, communication apprehension, and speech reticence. The communication anxiety-behavior therapy school regards excessive anxiety to be a primary factor in dysfunctional communication. This school…

Intended as an introduction to the problem of conducting an in-depth examination of speech behavior, this manual is based upon the findings of recent research and on developments in speech analysis. The seven chapters discuss the following: a rationale for evaluating speech habits, the role of listening in the analysis of speech habits,…

A study sought to determine what relationships existed between speech rate, speech pitch variation, speech loudness, and the personality assessments made by listeners. The subjects, 214 undergraduate speech communication students, listened to one of eight tape recordings made by a male speaker to represent all the combinations of the three…

The crib talk reported here of a 2;2-2;4-year-old boy replicates the phenomenon of crib talk reported in previous studies by other investigators. This study adds a corpus of mother-child interaction (MCI) and tests one aspect of the hypothesis that crib talk may enhance production of linguistic forms at a later date. Transcripts of monologues were…

PRE-PILOT AND PILOT STUDIES WERE UNDERTAKEN TO SURVEY ANXIETY LEVELS IN THE SPEECH BEHAVIOR OF 45 ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN. DURING THE PRE-PILOT STUDY, FOUR TESTS DESIGNED TO REVEAL THE STUDENTS' CONSCIOUS ANXIETY WERE DEVELOPED AND REGULARIZED. A QUESTIONNAIRE CONCERNING THE ATTITUDES OF TEACHERS TOWARD STUDENTS SPEECH ANXIETY INDICATED…

Conversations between adult students of English as a second language were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed in order to establish principles of extralinguistic conversational repair technique among second language learners. A variety of gestural and kinesic features were discovered; these are described in detail and their use is contextualized…

IT HAS BEEN HYPOTHESIZED THAT THE ADOPTION OF THE LINGUISTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF A SUBCULTURE OTHER THAN A CHILD'S OWN IS A VALID INDICATION OF THE DEGREE TO WHICH THE CHILD HAS BECOME SOCIALIZED INTO THAT SUBCULTURE. TO EXAMINE THIS HYPOTHESIS, RESEARCH WAS CONDUCTED (1) TO EXPLORE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LINGUISTIC HABITS AND ATTITUDE…

Several types of narrative errors are discussed that were found in the course of an analysis of stories collected in casual settings from a number of American speakers in undirected conversation. The approach to the question of error correction is sociocultural; the emphasis is on the motivation for the error correction. This paper explores the…

In the last 15 years much attention has been devoted to the identification and description of varieties (register and style) of language within the same speech community. The Research Section, Directorate of Studies, Staff Development Branch, Public Service Commission of Canada carried out three TESL-oriented linguistic studies on the…

Vocabulary diversity is a measure either of the language spoken within a fixed time period or of the total utterances, sentences, or words. To measure children's language development as revealed by the diversity of their spoken expression, a comparison was made of the vocabulary of 15 first-grade children of average ability, of first-grade primers…

This study supports the hypothesis that educated white listeners react negatively to the phonological variations of non-standard English. White college freshmen and seniors listened to a recorded tape of ten speakers, black and white with standard and non-standard styles of pronunciation, all reading the same passage. Students were asked to judge…

Deals with the neglect of instruction in listening and speaking, a fact attributed to a shortage of instructional materials, and teachers' lack of knowledge in these areas. Reviews the available literature and suggests steps to be taken to develop a curriculum in listening and speaking using these materials as a foundation. (RBW)

A survey of university faculty responses to questionable usage by their students reveals a wide variation in expectations with regard to usage among the group. Suggests the need to devise strategies that take into account the wide gap between the ideal of proper grammar and the reality of an infinity of standards. (RBW)