A 13-episode British television serial about international countries competing for a large project in an imaginary country provides the basis for a series of instructional materials in intercultural business communication. Video is seen as an excellent tool for teaching languages and other aspects of communication because it allows entry into the…

This account of the intonation of English is part of ongoing research at the University of Birmingham, England. It attempts to take account of how intonation contributes to the communicative value of an act of speech. An introductory chapter provides a short discussion of some crucial terms: pitch, loudness, stress, rhythm, and tone unit. The…

The ontogenetic development of human vocal utterances and their role in early interaction processes were studied with a three-month-old baby. Recordings were made of infant vocalizations in the home and the sounds were classified. During a five-minute segment between the mother and infant, the infant produced 59 utterances, 93 percent of which had…

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…

This paper reviews several studies that have sought to explain the role of nonverbal communication in education contexts. The specific areas that are explored include kinesics, eye contact, paralanguage, classroom environment, proxemics, and physical appearance. After reviewing research in these areas, the paper examines the research conclusions…

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…

THE RELATIONSHIP OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT TO CULTURAL BARRIERS AND THE TEACHING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES IS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE. VARIOUS VIEWS OF THE MEANING OF CULTURE ARE MENTIONED IN ORDER TO SINGLE OUT ANTHROPOLOGICAL CULTURE AS A MAIN FOCAL POINT. INTERCULTURAL DIFFERENCES ARE SPELLED OUT WITH EXAMPLES OF LINGUISTIC BARRIERS, AND…

Linguistic research has paid little attention to "fillers." These so-called "hesitation forms" can be classified as being either "buffers" or "back channel elicitors," the former being self-primers, and the latter being other-directed. These forms are difficult to distinguish without access to kinesic and…

Information gathered from one and a half years of interviews with anthropologists, psychologists, ethologists, sociologists, and psychiatrists provides the source of answers for the questions this book addresses: How much do we communicate with words, and how much with gestures, postures, and movement? What can we learn from the study of nonverbal…

This collection, representing the fruits of recent international work, consists of reprints of articles from the 1967 and 1968 issues of the journal "Social Science Information." It brings together a variety of studies by semioticians of both East and West--treatments of theoretical and methodological issues of modern semiotics, semiotic analysis…

Paralinguistic and kinesic expression begin at birth and are essential to the development of language. Rhythm, for example, a suprasegmental event, appears to be present at birth or prior to birth. The relationship of physiology to communication is evident in the observations of extra-linguistic aspects of communication, such as movement, the use…

Discusses the signals that are used to create, sustain, and end conversational involvement in two different languages, with examples provided of paralinguistic attention getters, linguistic conversation initiation signals, "in-tune" signals, and "face-saving" signals from a study of English and Greek. (CB)

Students of German need to be made aware of the pragmatic contrasts between American English and standard German to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings. Examples are given of contrasts such as power relationships between speaker and listener, affecting choice of verb; the uses of "bitte" and "danke" versus "please"…

A pilot study of a larger project on second language comprehension under two input conditions is reported. The first condition is characterized by the availability of samples of target input that have been modified a priori toward greater semantic redundancy and transparency and less complex syntax. The second condition is characterized by the…

Instructional materials designed to be used with the feature films "Old Yeller" and "The Miracle Worker" in classes of English as a second language include, for each film, general notes on film presentation, a teacher's synopsis of the film divided into segments, a student viewing guide and vocabulary preview for each segment,…