Chapman's Coatesville address: A hermeneutic reading

Rhetoric has claimed Chapman's Coatesville address as its own, but the hermeneutic tradition adds to our understanding of it. As a speech act it was intentionally a non‐event, a memorial for its own failure. This was its strange rhetorical purpose and its claim on a posthumous textual life. In a strange way, it is more a hermeneutic than a rhetorical act, an anticipation of its own future life after death. The open‐ended strategy of the speech is a self‐reflexive enactment. Chapman's Coatesville address is a textual model, illustrating the passage from autobiography to rhetorical engagement, from self to community. Because its community is the nation that as yet has not dealt with its darkest problem, the narrative identity of the speech's audience is an identity in process. Caught up in the reception of the speech, we are still being invited to respond to that lynching at Coatesville.     

Anger Among Allies: Audre Lorde's 1981 Keynote Admonishing the National Women's Studies Association

This essay argues that Audre Lorde's 1981 keynote speech, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” has much to contribute to communication scholars’ understanding of human biases and rhetorical artistry. The significance of Lorde's subject is one reason for devoting critical attention to her speech, because, in contemporary public life in the United States, anger has abiding relevance in an extraordinary range of rhetoric and public address. Another reason for contemplating Lorde's speech is the fact that anger was a major theme throughout the internationally acclaimed poet-activist's advocacy. The essay suggests that Lorde's speech illustrates a communication technique, shifting subjectivities, which recurs in her rhetorical artistry.     

Evaluating a method for eliciting children's voice about educational support with children with speech,language and communication needs

This article reports the development and evaluation of a toolkit‐based approach to eliciting children's experiences of educational support, where the children in question experience speech and communication needs. The ‘Your Voice Your Choice’ approach was evaluated using a cross‐case analysis methodology, which represents a novel approach to critical examination of the effectiveness of such resources. We explored seven case studies within a critical realist framework. We found that the toolkit was effective at supporting most (although not all) of the children with speech and communication needs to explore their school learning and support experiences through a scaffolded emotion‐based ‘dialogue’, which was corroborated by observations and other data sources. The toolkit facilitated access to children's voice as they revealed how they felt across a number of relational, learning and support areas, which could be used by services to focus provision and consider how to better support children's social and emotional needs.     

Strategies of remembrance in pre‐unification West Germany

By examining instances of dramatically rejected speech, critics can identify codes of the unsayable in a culture/situation, and by identifying what cannot be said publicly are better equipped to distinguish between types of national identity. In the years leading to German reunification, West German national identity was based upon various strategies of remembrance that are identified through a comparison of two speeches: Richard von Weizsäcker's celebrated 1985 parliamentary address commemorating the end of the Second World War in Europe and Philipp Jenninger's dramatically rejected parliamentary address in 1988 commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Kristallnacht.     

Earning One's Inheritance: Rhetorical Criticism,Everyday Talk,and the Analysis of Public Discourse

This article answers critical and theoretical calls for the study of ordinary talk by analyzing a transcribed speech in which Alvertis Simmons, a member of the Denver, Colorado, African American community, engaged a panel of school board officials on the topic of racial stereotypes in an elementary school science experiment. Simmons's discourse can be shown symbolically to reorganize features of integrationist and nationalist ways of speaking-two dominant strands of mid- to late-twentieth century African American public address. Building a theory of "oratorical influence" from these intertextual relationships, this essay concludes that the force of public discourse may reside less in a speaker's ability to persuade an audience than in an audience's willingness to recycle and revise figural aspects of a speaker's discourse in their everyday talk. An interpretive stance such as this can encourage rhetorical critics to expand their objects of critique, to include more ordinary ways of speaking that follow after highly styled public texts.     

Preschoolers' Associations Between Space and Numbers Can Be Biased by Surface Area

People associate numbers and horizontal space. This association has been demonstrated by the so‐called SNARC (Spatial‐Numerical Association of Response Codes)‐effect, with Western participants responding faster to larger numbers with their right hand and vice versa for smaller numbers. SNARC‐like effects have also been reported for preschoolers. However, it remains unclear whether children's SNARC‐effects are exclusively based on number or whether nonnumerical factors such as surface area can also play a role. To address this question, we asked children to compare quantities in a nonsymbolic number comparison task. On half of the trials, the larger set took up more total surface area (congruent trials), and on the other half, the smaller number had more surface area (incongruent trials). We obtained a significant interaction of SNARC‐like effects and congruency. SNARC‐effects were only observed for congruent trials, demonstrating that preschoolers' spatial‐numerical associations can be affected by nonnumerical magnitude.     

Enhancing English among second language learners: the pre‐school years

Informed by knowledge of linguistics, research findings in the areas of monolingual and bilingual acquisition, dyslexia and speech therapy clinical practice, five factors are proposed to argue that the acquisition of English by young non‐native learners can be enhanced by learning activities which take into account factors of developmental sequence in language acquisition, language‐specific properties, the relationship between oral and written language, the what‐to‐learn‐first issue and the quality of the language input. Proper language goals can be set and appropriate activities designed, only if the language input provider interacts with a learner in a concrete activity while being sensitive to the developmental trajectory of monolingual speaking children, the development of the less dominant language in a bilingual child, the prosodic and phonological differences between the learner's mother tongue and the target language, the importance of phonological awareness which defines dyslexia, the use of non‐abstract language structures grounded in concrete lexical items in the early stage of language acquisition and the strategy of expanding learners' utterance by one element as used in speech therapy.     

Classrooms for Children with Developmental Disabilities: Sound‐field and public address amplification systems compared

Background noise poses adverse effects on speech sounds and affects student learning, especially for children with developmental disabilities. Sound‐field and public address amplification systems can help to solve this problem by amplifying speech sounds relative to background noise. This study surveyed school classrooms for children with special needs, and compared the performance of a sound‐field and a portable public address system in classroom environments. Unoccupied room noise levels and reverberation times were measured in eight classrooms at four Hong Kong schools for children with special needs. Speech levels in each classroom were measured under three conditions: without amplification, with public address system amplification, and with sound‐field amplification. Speech‐to‐noise ratios were calculated for each condition. Noise and unamplified speech‐to‐noise ratio values exceeded recommended acoustic standards in all classrooms. When sound‐field and public address amplification systems were installed, speech‐to‐noise ratios improved considerably. When either amplification system was used, a uniform sound‐field resulted. The applicability of both types of amplification system and their relative merits in special education classrooms are discussed.     

Verbal Short‐Term Memory Underlies Typical Development of “Thought Organization” Measured as Speech Connectedness

Formal thought organization obtained from free speech, a key feature for psychiatric evaluations, has been poorly investigated during typical development. Computational tools such as speech graph connectedness (LSC) currently allow for an accurate quantification in naturalistic settings. LSC's typical development is better predicted by years of education than by age. Among beginning readers, the LSC of stories composed of short‐term memory predicted reading independently from IQ. Here we set out to test a longitudinal sample (6–8 years old, n = 45, followed for 2 years) to verify whether the LSC is predictive of various memory measures, and whether such relations can explain the correlation with reading. The LSC was specifically correlated with verbal short‐term memory performance. The results support the notion that the short‐term storage of verbal information is necessary to plan a story. Given the limited sample size, the relationship of this interaction with reading remains inconclusive.     

ECA's seventy‐fifth anniversary volume: A special review

In this special book review, Communication Quarterly's Book Review Editor, Gerald M. Phillips, assesses the volume commissioned by the Eastern Communication Association to commemorate ECA's seventy‐fifth anniversary. Designed to reflect the diversity of the discipline of communication, part one is composed of twelve chapters and surveys contemporary research and theory in rhetoric, the social sciences, oral interpretation, freedom of speech and civil liberties, media and speech education. Part two, composed of five chapters, provides an overview of the organizational and conceptual issues guiding the way in which this profession organizes its knowledge. Professor Phillips concludes that, “It is a book we can be proud of, because it is well done by first‐rate scholars.”     

Outcomes‐based Education in South African Curricular Reform: a response to Jonathan Jansen

An ‘outcomes‐based education’ (OBE) underlies South Africa's proposed new Curriculum 2005, one of the current government's initiatives to address the legacy of apartheid education. This response to Jonathan Jansen's critical analysis of OBE (Cambridge Journal of Education, 1998, 28, pp. 321‐331) contextualises the shift to an outcomes‐based education within an epistemological framework, drawing on Ryle's distinction between propositional and procedural knowledge. Curriculum 2005 as currently conceived lays a disproportionally heavy emphasis on procedural knowledge. The paper proposes that a less radical version of OBE, in which teachers integrate thoughtfully propositional, procedural and dispositional knowledge, will better address apartheid education's legacy     

Peirce and Aesthetic Education

Charles Sanders Peirce did not present a full account of a philosophy of education in his open‐ended conception of a philosophical system. However, he did have multiple and scattered reflections on the subject that can be used for addressing and criticising our conceptions of education. This article has been conceived as part of a broader project that aims to make a phenomenological approach to the subject of education and that tries to undercover the main features of how education can be undertaken and understood according to Peirce's categoriology. As I see it, this can be done by conceiving an education applied to Peirce´s normative sciences, aesthetics, ethics and logic. The present text will address the first part of this project, that is, the possibility of conceiving a pragmaticistic aesthetic education, which, in my point of view could and should work as base and framework of any kind of pedagogical endeavour.     

Understanding the role of private speech in children's emotion regulation

Self-regulation includes both cognitive and affective components, but few researchers have investigated how these components interact to better explain self-regulation. The purpose of this study was to investigate how children's private speech, which is typically related to cognitive ability, was utilized during an emotion-eliciting task. By examining the social and private speech that occurred as children coped with a frustration task, a better understanding of how children regulate their emotional displays can be achieved. Children's speech, emotional expressions (sadness and anger), and emotion regulation strategies (distraction and self-comforting) were coded during a frustration task completed by preschool-aged children (N = 116). Children's social speech to mothers and private speech were transcribed. Children's private speech was categorized according to five mutually exclusive categories: vocalizations, inaudible muttering, task-irrelevant, negatively valenced task-relevant, or facilitative task-relevant. Sadness was associated with more social speech and negatively valenced task-relevant private speech, whereas anger was associated with less distraction and facilitative task-relevant private speech and more vocalizations and negatively valenced task-relevant private speech. Additionally, private speech predicted unique variance beyond that explained by the emotion regulation strategies and moderated the relations of emotion regulation strategies to both anger and sadness. These empirical findings support theoretical propositions that language is a factor in children's emotion regulation. The implications of these findings include support for the encouragement of private speech in the classroom because of its relation to emotional, in addition to cognitive, regulatory functions.     

Reflecting Reflective Practice

This paper demystifies reflective practice on teaching by focusing on the idea of reflection itself and how it has been conceived by two philosophers, Plato and Irigaray. It argues that reflective practice has become a standardized method of defining the teacher in teacher education and teacher accreditation systems. It explores how practices of reflection themselves can suggest ways out of dictated pathways of reflection in teaching. Drawing on Luce Irigaray's and Plato's ideas on reflection, the paper includes a critical overview of how reflective practice can contradict its own aims and become non‐reflective, shutting off possibilities for transformations and educational differences that it has set out to achieve. Keeping up the deconstructive mood, the paper draws on Irigaray's re‐reading of Plato's parable of the cave to argue that reflective teaching that merely reflects phallogocentric educational systems and that attempts to universally reproduce standardized forms of reflective practice can never be conducive to the diversification of educational spaces.

The paper seeks to re‐think Plato's idea of reflection as mere copying and takes up Irigaray's strategic mimesis to explore ways through which reflective practice can regain its critical edge and reactivate teachers' reflective voices. It argues for the repetition of the practice of reflection by drawing on a feminist critique that challenges phallogocentric reflective tendencies in education and for mimetic strategies that engender difference.     

Fundamental Frequency and Temporal Modifications in the Speech of British Fathers to their Children

ABSTRACT A total of 16 British fathers were audiotaped reading aloud to and conversing with their children aged 1 to 3 years (A‐C speech or ‘fatherese'), and with an adult (A‐A speech). Data concerning vocal pitch (indicated by fundamental frequency Fo) and rate of speech were extracted from the audiotapes of the fathers’ speech. It was found that fathers’ A‐C speech relative to their A‐A speech was characterised by significantly higher Fo mode in both discourse forms, and also by significantly higher Fo mean in conversational speech (only). The variability of Fo was not altered in fatherese speech, but the time taken to read aloud a written extract was significantly greater. Wide individual variation was evident in the extent of both the Fo and temporal modifications of fatherese speech. British fatherese speech was found to be characterised by a different combination of prosodic modifications when compared with British motherese speech.     

Small Talk: Identifying communication problems in maltreated children

Development of speech and language is rapid in early years, yet if developmental problems in speech and language are not addressed they are likely to continue and impact negatively on a child's overall development and their life trajectory. Children who have experienced abuse and or neglect are particularly vulnerable. The aim of this study was to develop a tool to assist in identifying a child's need for assessment by a speech pathologist so that there could be early identification of problems. A culturally sensitive tool was developed to be completed by the child's carer included questions on language, speech and hearing, voice, fluency, understanding sentences, vocabulary and expression. Sixty-five children aged between 4 and 8 years, who had experienced abuse and/or neglect participated in the study. Fourteen percent were Aboriginal. A speech pathologist undertook an assessment for each child and the results were compared with the information on the Small Talk tool. The Tool was found to be high in sensitivity but low in specificity, requiring further refinement. However, it has the potential to assist non speech pathologists to identify a child's need for speech and language assessment with the findings identifying the Tool as promising practice.     

Connecting students to the real world: Developing gifted behaviors through service learning

Learning in today's classrooms can be disconnected from students' real world experiences. Providing students the opportunity to address real‐world problems may provide avenues for students to engage in their communities while developing academic skills and knowledge. Additionally, for students whose interests are piqued by the nature of their community's problems, these activities have the potential to offer students meaningful, motivating work in a supportive environment. This article explores how providing students with interest‐based service‐learning opportunities may help them develop and demonstrate gifted behaviors. In addition, methods for integrating student interests and service‐learning projects are presented. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The Rhetorical Success of Thabo Mbeki's 1996 “I Am an African” Address

Thabo Mbeki's 1996 “I Am an African” address, delivered on the occasion of the Constitutional Assembly's passage of a new constitution for a truly democratic South Africa, was successful and memorable. Three strategies account for its success: its use of what Bakhtin termed “stylization,” which allowed the rhetor to invest the speech with the aura of John F. Kennedy; its strategic shifting from the first-person singular to the first-person plural; and, most important, its construction of a narrative history of South Africa that, modeled on Scripture, celebrates the South African people's past, present, and future.