This paper reveals ways in which teachers can use roles and role playing to facilitate children's understanding and expression, by giving an example of a drama in which the teacher assumed a role. In this dramatic situation, a group of eight-year-olds and nine-year-olds was asked to assume the roles of American Indians whose valley was threatened…

Pragmatics, or functional communication, refers to the transactions that occur between people, or the actual performance of language in social contexts. This paper discusses several functional communication theories, applies these theories to the education of children, and offers a number of practical techniques for teaching creative dramatics.…

This study focused on whether actual or stereotypic associations with a speaker's body type would affect his or her credibility. Effects on the source-credibility ratings submitted by a total of 165 students were investigated for three different sources' body types. A significant main effect was found for body type but not for the blocked…

Linguistics retains from its antecedents, philology and the study of sacred writings, some of their apologetic and theological bias. Thus it has not been able to face squarely the question how linguistic function may have evolved from animal communication. Chimpanzees' use of signs from American Sign Language forces re-examination of language…

This dissertation explores techniques that assist actors in getting their minds and bodies out of the way through consciousness-expanding. The techniques examined here attempt to promote a permeability, a childlike quality of presence, and are largely drawn from Eastern philosophies. Part one of this dissertation discusses structural integration,…

This study investigated the impact of the major and minor modes of a melody on perceptions of shots in a short videotape. One hundred forty-six undergraduate communications students from Queens College in New York were exposed to the experimental situation. Three variables were manipulated: the first shot portrayed a male actor who had either a…

A framework which considers speech and language as separate entities in a symbiotic relationship is presented, and basic questions are raised concerning how speech and language function together and what their reciprocal effects are. Based on the notion that speech and language are independent, various examples of speech without language and of…

This investigation considered several issues relevant to the assessment of teacher nonverbal behaviors in the classroom. Multiple steps were taken to identify teacher proximity as a quantifiable dimension of teacher nonverbal behavior. These steps include the following: a) isolation of the student-initiated question frame as a suitable and…

In exploring nonverbal language, this book suggests activities in which children can express and interpret meanings with more than words, provides a starting point for teachers in helping children develop nonverbal communication skills, and recommends that teachers build language arts programs which emphasize more than just words. Contents consist…

A normal Japanese boy (11-months-old) was observed while playing alone and while interacting with his mother to study the child's physical and vocal imitation and to determine the relationship between his use of physical (nonverbal) and vocal (verbal) communication. During 10 free play sessions, four observers noted occurrences of such behavior as…

Described is the development of an observation instrument that is designed to give a measure of the overall teaching strategy or style used by a teacher including both verbal and non-verbal interactions between teachers, students, and the physical materials which constitute the classroom environment. The instrument was developed to give a single…

To study maternal behaviors as related to social class differences, 30 middle class and 30 working class white mothers were observed at home on two separate days with their 10-month-old firstborn baby girls. Predesignated behaviors which occurred during 5-second intervals were recorded by an observer. Total observation time was 4 hours for each…

Improving the act of teaching in a classroom implies the need to study nonverbal cues and events, for many classroom phenomena serve as communicators of information and tend to either facilitate or inhibit learning. Nonverbal language, a reflection of both cultural and individual differences, includes not only the teacher's facial expressions,…

Summaries of previous projects and present research needs precede this report of a study which investigated in detail one phase of music learning: overt music performance learning behaviors. The Observable Performance Learning Behavior Classification Index and the behavior encoding process were utilized to identify, to classify, and to time…

This training package in nonverbal communication and the affective domain rests on the rationale that nonverbal communication is a support system for the verbal message that we convey and that it can be divided into two channels--the vocal and the kinetic. The vocal channel consists of the pitch of the voice, and the kinetic consists of postures,…