Spoken communication between residents (n=10; ages 12-21) and staff members in an institution for people with mental retardation was examined. Findings suggest that staff members and residents differed in their use of topics, with staff members talking primarily about instructional and behavior management topics and residents focusing mostly on…

This investigation assessed the importance of orientation behavior on group consensus and the individual satisfaction of participants. Students in four sections of an introductory speech course rated each classmate on a seven-point scale according to orientation behavior as manifested in the ability to resolve conflict, reinforce agreement,…

Sociolinguists have recently demonstrated the value of directives in indicating the relationship between status and linguistic form. The purpose of the instrument developed for this study was to quantify the coerciveness of directives on the basis of the theoretical approaches in the literature to objectify the comparison of directive forms.…

Two experiments investigating the efficiency of communication between 5th grade children from differing socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds are described. In each experiment, 40 same-sex pairs, half male and half female, were formed into dyadic groupings by combining lower- and middle-SES children into the four possible speaker-listener combinations.…

This study examined the conversation patterns of 26 Hawaiian kindergarten children in order to determine whether children with a Hawaiian Creole (HC) preference or a Standard English (SE) preference speak to each other. The normal interactions of the children (14 boys and 12 girls) were monitored during the learning center sessions of the…

Anthropologists have indicated that the need to act politically and to avoid the appearance of such action is marked in egalitarian societies. The perils of confrontation in such societies often foster indirect and highly allusive speech. This paper invesitgates the relationship between direct and indirect speech in an Indo-Fijian community which…

The papers in this collection were initially presented in two successive conferences that dealt with the collection, use, and reporting of spoken language for educational research. The ten papers deal with the method and procedures used in studying talk in a school situation; an analysis of the interaction between the researcher and a group of…

The application of hermeneutic theory to the study of the oral history interview is proposed in this paper. The first section of the paper indicates why the oral interview is central to the approach of the oral historian; it then defines oral history as a communicative process and suggests an approach to investigating the oral interview that uses…

This study tested two primary hypotheses concerning the effects of mispronunciation on the ratings of source credibility. First, as the number of mispronunciations presented by a speaker increases, audience ratings of source credibility will decrease. Second, the effects hypothesized in the first statement will be stronger for audiences at a more…

Argues that adjustment to nursing homes is influenced by peer group and staff-patient interaction. Concludes that both staff and residents place demands and expectations on newcomers' conduct, and staff define successful and unsuccessful adjustment so that patients are constrained in the range of socially acceptable behavior they are permitted to…

Outlines conceptual distinction among avoidance, cooperation, and competitive conflict resolution strategies used by marital partners. Couples (N=43) were audiotaped as they discussed previous disagreements. Found the temporal aspects of speech, including turn-taking and interruptions, need to be considered in the study of couples' conflict…

Speculates on how central concepts in Basil Bernstein's work can, with some revision, yield a descriptive-analytic framework for the study of communicative competence, particularly in its developmental sense. (PD)

Forty college students of second-year French were used to study the extent to which individual learners exercise initiative in structuring classroom talk. Textual outcomes of four typical tasks for pairs were examined. Interactions were coded in four areas (topic, self-selection, allocation, and sequencing); results showed variation in the extent…

Emphasizes that communicating in a foreign language requires understanding the linguistic strategies of its speakers as expressions of their frame of participation and underlying preferred politeness strategies in order to respond appropriately. The article presents results from sociolinguistic research studying a group of Spanish speakers…