Many teachers in the Sheboygan (Wisconsin) Area School District's alternative programs use principles taught to behavioral disordered students for confronting and handling difficult situations when they must confront other adults in the school system about their concerns and problems. A positive and effective adult confrontation process is…

Two case studies involving possible violations of the rights of Spanish speaking criminal suspects are presented. In cases where suspects do not understand English, the Miranda warnings regarding the right to remain silent must be delivered in their native language and in a way that is understandable to the suspects. In the two cases involving…

To introduce students to the actual environment in which professional level communication takes place early in the term of a business writing course, students are asked what they believe to be the major communication difficulties faced by business people in their everyday routines. The responses are listed and then compared with actual instances…

Spurred by the impetus of the antipoverty programs of the 1960's, social science researchers and human service practitioners have focused upon the need for effective communication with the American urban poor. To this end, both groups have attempted to describe the context within which the urban poor receive and process messages in the hopes of…

A workshop type method of training teachers in the use of counseling techniques for facilitating parent teacher conferences is described. It is based on the Carkhuff model of attending, responding, initiating, and communicating. At each of the four stages, the leader first discusses its purpose and the specific behaviors to be encompassed in the…

Over the past three decades administrators of the California community college system have focused attention on system growth and expansion, changes in student body characteristics, and funding support problems while ignoring the system's principal function, teaching. In order to improve understanding of the teaching function and to elevate…

Described are scales of communicative interaction which can be used to evaluate children who are marginal communicators (such as the retarded, emotionally disturbed, or culturally deprived) by determining at what level the child uses interactive language in various situations. (LS)

A study analyzed the verbal interactions of married couples in high, moderate, and low marital satisfaction groups to determine whether (1) the interaction processes within the three satisfaction groups differed and (2) there were different communication patterns that characterized the interaction processes of the groups. Subjects were 34 young…

To identify the communication activities and problems found in the world of work, the Communication Activity Questionnaire (CAQ) was developed and mailed to 500 recent graduates from professional and preprofessional colleges and departments of a midwestern university. The questionnaire requested the subjects to rate 17 communication activities in…

The findings of a task force, appointed to investigate the communication gap between non-English speaking residents in Los Angeles County and available county services, are presented in this report. Two objectives dealt with are: (1) the consolidation of available data on foreign language groups in Los Angeles County and their approximate number…

The comparative validity of observations recorded by volunteer telephone crisis workers was examined. To assess workers' listening and response skills, an instrument was devised to rate callers' expressed stress level, confidence in self, confidence in using other community resources, and duration of stress. Groups of 10 workers were invited to…

This paper examines the essential skill components involved in interpersonal competence and the relationship between a deficit of such skills and loneliness. The various sections of the paper discuss the nature of loneliness, the nature of interpersonal competence, the causes of competence and incompetence, and the relationship between the…

The possibility that judges' expectancy effects may adversely affect the results of jury trials is a problem that needs careful theoretical analysis and innovative methods of resolution. Traditional efforts by the legal community to counteract the threat of verbal/nonverbal bias by judges include the "Code of Judicial Conduct," curative…

The COMP-LAB, a CUNY-based writing course combining classroom instruction with an autotutorial writing laboratory for students deficient in standard written English, is described and evaluated in this assessment. The background and purpose of the project are discussed in the first two sections, prior to an extensive description of the project…