Book reviews

Creative Dramatics: An Art for Children

This study is focused upon an investigation of the content and methodology of the introductory speech course in the Oregon community colleges. The current content appears to be one of an emphasis on skill building in the area of public speaking. Previous research in the area of content and methodology of the basic course have centered on the courses offered at four-year institutions and has asked only faculty and administrators what they felt should be offered in the introductory course. This research study will instead question students and faculty at the vocational level in the community college of Oregon to see if there is a similarity in their concepts of what should be taught in this course. An answer to the following question was sought: to what extent are the underlying assumptions of the basic speech courses at the community college level seen by the instructors similar to or different from the self-reported needs in communication training if the community college student?

Objective: To challenge students' memorization and speaking skills by having them present an excerpt from a previously delivered speech Courses: Basic, public speaking

Despite assessment's prominence in higher education, many communication departments still find its implementation problematic. In this case study, we answer a call for heightened research pertaining to the best practices for assessment of large, multisection, standardized public speaking courses. We demonstrate the ease with which the basic course can be justified to administrators by citing the course's significant reduction of students' Public Speaking Anxiety (PSA) as assessed by one of the discipline's standard measures of PSA, the Personal Report of Public Speaking Anxiety. Implications include validation of a course design and assessment that provide administration with measures of significant and salient success, and an especially profound positive impact of the course for women.

Objective: Students will explore the relationship between music and powerful speech Courses: Argumentation, Debate, Public Speaking, Rhetoric

DICTIONARY OF EDUCATION, Second Edition, Carter V. Good, Editor, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 676 pp., 1959. $9.75. ACCELERATED TYPING, by Roger H. Nelson, Box 72, Foothill Station, Salt Lake City 8, Utah: Business Education Publishers, Inc., 523 pp., 1959. $3.95. TODAY'S BUSINESS MACHINES, by Harrison Fisher, Chicago: American Technical Society, 1959, $4.95 cloth; $3.25 flexible binding. DUPLICATION DO'S AND DON'TS, by W. A. Richards and Robert Woodward, Portland, Oregon: Allied Publishers Incorporated, 127 pp., 1959. $2.95. MODERN SALESMANSHIP: Principles and Problems, by Edwin Charles Greif, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 550 pp., 1958. $9.00. FUNDAMENTAL ACCOUNTING PRINCIPLES, Revised by William W. Pyle and John Arch White, Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, Inc., 753 pp., 1959. $7.00.

Moving From "Parent Involvement" to Family-Centered Services

Response to Craig

This study investigated 113 community college students enrolled in face-to-face and online speech communication courses and their perceptions of instructor speech assessments. Each course completed a self-inventory questionnaire using Google Forms at the completion of the semester. Descriptive statistics and an independent samples t-test analyzed responses. Students enrolled in a face-to-face public speaking course reported statistically significant higher levels of satisfaction with instructor assessment as opposed to those enrolled online. In addition, the results suggest students in a traditional environment believed instructor assessment played a role in increased credibility related to public speaking. These findings enhance the literature through the discovery of significant differences between groups in multiple areas related to instructor feedback. Findings may help design more valuable assessments for online students to more effectively achieve course outcomes and improve performance.

Reviews Language & Learning Disorders of the Preacademic Child with Curriculum Guide, Tina E. Bangs, 293 pp., Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 2nd ed., 1982. This edition is filled with current information on topics including PL 94-142, language acquisition , learning theory, program design, and instructional projects. Every page is filled with valuable information for teachers of children under age six. Unfortunately, chapter 10 contains inaccuracies in the section titled "Oral and Manual Systems ." The author has confused information on the differences and origins of Signed English and the SEE systems. Another error on the subject of Total Communication, "Proponents of the system believe that children eventually will drop signs (emphasis added) and develop better oral communication skills." To my knowledge, this has never been an underlying tenet of the philosophy—on the contrary, signs are considered of equal importance to speech. The subtle implication here is that signs are somehow "less" than speech. Incorrect summaries such as this of the philosophy perpetuate damaging misconceptions by the lay person. The author has done an admirable job of translating theory to practice by providing teaching techniques, curriculum guides, developmental scales, case history forms, and examples of teacher made tests. This volume would be an important addition to the library of individuals who work with young children. Jan H. DuBois Family Education and Early Intervention Program Maryland School for the Deaf Frederick, Maryland The Sounds Of Speech Communication: A Primer Of Acoustic Phonetics And Speech Perception, J. M. Pickett, Ph.D., 249 pp., $19.95, University Park Press, 233 East Redwood Street, Baltimore, Md. 21202,1980. In his book Pickett presents the basic principles of acoustic phonetics in a logical, lucid manner . Early sections present concepts of speech production, sound, resonance, and spectrum analysis in terms that should be comprehended with ease by the undergraduate student in a speech science course. Later chapters that deal with vowel shaping and effects of place and manner of constrictions of the oro-pharyngeal cavity on visible and acoustic portrayals of speech sounds become somewhat more complex but should be particularly helpful for student and professionals working with the hearing impaired or deaf and for those interested in speech perception. Very brief reviews of historical approaches to methods of investigation along with reviews of current literature and directions of research enable the reader to follow the progression. Summaries at the end of the later, more technical chapters are presented in table form to facilitate a succinct review of the research discussed. One criticism is the placement of some of the figures which makes referring from figure to text awkward. The final chapter presents brief explanations of motor theories of speech perception. Twelve laboratory exercises designed to illustrate specific principles discussed in each chapter are appended. The theoretical material on speech perception is sparse; the results of current work in infant and adult speech perception are not included in this text. Elaine Luskey, Ph.D. Professor Speech and Language Pathology Cleveland State University Cleveland, Ohio 44115 Gestures, Desmond Morris, Peter Collett, Peter Marsh, and Marie O'Shaughnessy, 296 pp., $12.95, Stein and Day, Briarcliff, N.Y. 10510. As in his books The Naked Ape and Manwatching , anthropologist Desmond Morris provides, in Gestures, a fascinating and enjoyable account of the origins and meanings of 20 key gestures. The authors settled on the 20 symbolic gestures from a large number of possible alternatives, identified in interviews of 1,200 people throughout 40 localities in 25 countries, involving 15 different languages. At each of the 40 locations, 30 adult male subjects were selected at random in public places—such as restaurants, parks, bars, streets, squares, and quay-sides—and were shown a sheet of standard drawings depicting the 20 key gestures. If there was any doubt about a particular drawing, the investigator would then enact the gesture to provide additional information. Some of the author's findings included the realization (a) that many of the gestures had several major meanings; (b) that many of the gestures crossed national and linguistic boundaries ; (c) that certain of the gestures showed ranges that stopped, sometimes quite abruptly, within a particular linguistic area; (d) that in 390 A.A.D. I August 1982...

In Sri Lanka, which used to be British Ceylon for nearly 15 decades, BrE used to hold a dominant position in all aspects of life. Under globalisation, a shift is observed taking place towards AmE due to numerous developments in science, technology, industry, commerce, politics, and popular culture. Academics and professionals depend on audiovisual recordings of presentations produced either in Standard British English (BrE) or Standard American English (AmE) and broadcast in public media. Against this background, this paper examines the dynamicity of English pronunciation in Sri Lanka caused by BrE and AmE, to which the ESL learners on the island are daily exposed. It also investigates the extent to which BrE and AmE respectively influence English pronunciation in Sri Lanka, filling a notable gap in the existing literature. The research provides valuable insights into some emerging trends in English pronunciation in Sri Lanka, the conditions that influence the Sri Lankan speakers’ attitudes toward the two varieties of English, and the support the ESL teachers can derive from their awareness of pronunciational swings between BrE and AmE in organising teaching practices and materials. Further, some major pronunciation differences between BrE and AmE are explored, highlighting both disparities and exceptions consistent in certain phonetic features. Finally, it explores the dynamicity of English pronunciation in Sri Lanka, emphasizing the need to consider both local and global factors in ESL teaching, with suggestions for effective language learning and communication in global contexts.

The objective of this work is two-fold. Firstly, we aim at detecting similarities and differences between the consonant systems of two languages, namely, American English and Mexican Spanish. To achieve this, we perform a theoretic comparative analysis of consonants of the two languages at the level of both phonemes and allophones. Secondly, a possible practical usage of our results is considered; therefore, as an example of an application, we consider computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) for teaching American English pronunciation to Mexican Spanish speakers. In particular, we took advantage of the results of our analysis to define some hypothetic error patterns which can be used as a starting point for diagnosing possible mispronunciations, their posterior verification, and adjustment taking into account the principles of phonotactics and empirical phonetic analysis of the English learners’ speech. The latter will result in error rules to be applied in a CAPT system for error identification and generation of appropriate corrective feedback. An adequate choice of correcting techniques will improve English pronunciation acquisition and help learners to develop less accented speech. Also, similarities found between the two consonant systems make it possible to organize and present the pronunciation teaching material using a stress-free method of helping learners to adjust their speech organs to new sounds building on the phonetic habits of their first language.

This paper examines the segmental and suprasegmental features of the 800 elementary English words in the 2022 revised national curriculum. The aim is to offer specific guidelines for elementary English education and to propose ideas for future curriculum revisions. The research involved transcribing the 800 headwords for elementary English into the International Phonetic Alphabets based on American English pronunciation and analyzing two suprasegmental features (syllable structure and stress) and two segmental features (onset and coda). Results show that the 800 elementary English words encompass a broad spectrum of sound paradigms, including various syllable structures, manners and points of articulation, and consonant clusters. However, there are limitations in the frequency distributions of certain suprasegmental and segmental features, which may affect young learners’ acquisition of English word sounds. Based on these findings, the paper discusses pedagogical implications for the revision of the basic vocabulary list and the development of elementary English lessons.

The redundancy of self-organization as an explanation of English spelling Geoffrey Sampson Kristian Berg and Mark Aronoff (2017; henceforth B&A) use historical data on the spellings of various English suffixes to argue for the role of ‘self-organization’ as a process by which system emerges spontaneously in an unregulated linguistic domain. They argue that choices of spelling for given phonological suffixes gradually settled down in such a way that spellings became indicators of part of speech. This is an attractive idea, but B&A’s data fail to support it, because they do not adequately consider the availability of other explanations. Data cannot constitute evidence for a novel theory, if they are already convincingly accounted for independently of that theory. This, I believe, applies to most if not all spellings cited by B&A. Many are explainable in terms of phonological detail, or of the nature of education during the relevant period; some have more specialized explanations. B&A discuss four cases: the suffixes -ous, -ic, -al, and -y, together (in each of the four cases) with suffixes that are phonologically similar but spelled differently. To keep the length of this commentary within bounds, I do not deal exhaustively with every example word cited by B&A. I begin by showing that for their first case, -ous, all of their data are convincingly accounted for by explanations independent of ‘self-organization’. Then from B&A’s three other cases I pick out examples that introduce considerations different in kind from those already discussed. I do not claim to be able to ‘explain away’ every last one of B&A’s data. But that is to be expected, considering that I do not have (and perhaps no one has) an ideally complete knowledge of the evolution of English spelling and English pronunciation (particularly the pronunciation of vowels in unstressed syllables). However, the proportion of B&A’s examples not accounted for by any of the principles I discuss is not large enough, I believe, to leave the case for self-organization persuasive. B&A introduce the -ous case by displaying a table (their Table 2, p. 45) that lists alternative graphic patterns for words that they regard as sharing a common phonological suffix,1 which they transcribe as /ɨs/. (1) <ous> as in hazardous, nervous <us> bonus, genius <is> glottis, tennis <ess> hostess, princess <ice> office, service B&A note (p. 41) that the CELEX database used for their research makes a phonetic distinction between [ǝs] as in nervous and [ɪs] as in office, but they see that as not relevant because ‘[t]his distinction is not justified phonetically in many varieties of English’; they suggest, citing Flemming and Johnson (2007), that in American English the distinction only occurs in the special case of pairs like Rosa’s, roses. However, what matters for B&A’s argument is not the phonology of any present-day English dialect, but that of the language during the period when spelling conventions were still evolving. [End Page e43] (For -ous and all but one of the other phonological suffixes discussed by B&A, the endpoint of the period they consider is 1710.) One cannot assume that this resembled present-day American English in the relevant respect, considering that in standard British Received Pronunciation (RP) the five graphic patterns listed above correspond to at least three different phonological patterns. A. C. Gimson (1967) gives hazardous, nervous, bonus, and genius with /ǝs/; glottis, tennis, office, and service with /is/; princess with /es/ (thus not wholly unstressed); and hostess with /is/ but /es/ as a ‘less frequent’ variant. Failure to distinguish the reduced vowels of tennis and office from those of hazardous and nervous is unusual in Britain, as demonstrated by the fact that it is a striking feature of the speech of Tony Blair, prime minister from 1997 to 2007, which otherwise conforms to RP norms.2 B&A’s decision to ignore the contrast between [ǝs] and [ɪs] would be justified if American English reflected the original position in this case and RP usage were innovative. For some of the obvious phonological differences between the two dialects, that is so, but here the truth...

English intonation is an integral component of English pronunciation teaching. However, as students’ proficiency levels in English pronunciation improve, it remains unclear whether their intonation levels also develop. The present study, based on the second language intonation learning theory, aims to investigate the influence of English proficiency on Chinese EFL learners’ production of English pitch accents, edge tones, and intonation patterns from the perspective of phonological representation. Two language groups of participants took part in a reading task: native English speakers (12) and Chinese EFL learners (36). The learners were classified into three groups based on their scores in the Chivox National Spoken English Test, ranked from high to low: the advanced, intermediate, and elementary groups. The reading task comprised 90 dialogue pairs. The participants were required to read part B of each dialogue pair aloud, but afterwards, only the Chinese EFL learners attended the semi-structured interview. The results showed that the native English speakers only demonstrated significant differences from each learner group in four of the ten intonation types involving the three aspects of English intonation, which may indicate regional variations in American English and difficulties distinguishing (H*) and (L+H*). In addition, there were no significant differences between the three learner groups in producing the ten intonation types, which maybe attributed to their similar learning experiences.