1 Why Include Oral Communication in Your Course?
What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.
—Frank R. Pierson
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.
The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.
—Stephen King
Be sincere; be brief; be seated.
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt
From American presidents to CEOs, inventors to aviators, and authors to film directors—the importance of communication can be seen in cliché after cliché, heard in motivational speech upon motivational speech, and read in one inspirational book after another. Its importance is not debatable; its presence in our lives, a given. Yet, doing it well requires conscientiousness and effort. Doing it poorly can have devastating consequences. And as with many things, teaching it well is a completely different beast than actually mastering it yourself. Furthermore, teaching it well when it is not your primary area of study, course content, or research may seem like a challenging task. This book is meant to help you in this endeavor— to teach communication within your discipline in a way that serves your own instructional goals. By incorporating communication in your courses, you have the potential to help your students learn what it means to interact as a member of your discipline, to prepare your students for future success in the workplace, to engage your students in the course material in more thoughtful ways, and to encourage civic participation and responsibility. Helping students learn to communicate well is helping them learn to be confident, thoughtful, and proactive agents of change. Helping students use communication to learn course material is helping them learn to be independent, invested critical learners. Helping you learn to help your students communicate is what this book is about.
Why Oral Communication? Why Now?
The quotations at the beginning of this book illustrate the widespread recognition of the importance of communication. There is evidence, as well, in a number of different arenas (beyond popular quotations) to support the centrality of communication. In the business world, for example, what is clear is that businesses and industries are consistently recognizing communication competence as critical and necessary for college graduates. Key points include
•The National Associations of Colleges and Employees’(NACE) 2015 Job Outlook Report describes results of a survey of employers on the qualities that make up an ideal candidate for a job. Communication skills (the ability of students to write and speak clearly) ranked high, with nearly 80 percent of respondents identifying team work skills, 73.4 percent identifying written communication skills, and 67 percent identifying verbal communication skills as attributes sought on a candidate’s resume (National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2014).
•CollegeGrad.com conducts a survey on employers’ desired qualities for new college graduates every two years. In the past two surveys, the second identified “most important” quality was a student’s interviewing skills—ranking above GPA, internship experience, and computer skills (retrieved from http://www.collegegrad.com/press/whatemployerswant.shtml).
•Silicon Valley employers surveyed reported wanting new employees to have better communication skills—including the ability to use vocabulary appropriately and the ability to professionally use language (Stevens, 2005).
•In two qualitative studies completed by the Microsoft Corporation on struggles new employees faced with socialization in the Microsoft workplace, new employees identified communication as a key struggle—articulating the need to learn to work in large teams and to learn how to ask good questions of colleagues and managers (Begel & Simon, 2008).
•Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, on behalf of the California Foundation for Commerce and Education and funded by the Gates and Hewlett Foundations, conducted a survey and focus groups among California business leaders to get their opinions on public education. One emerging theme was a desire for graduates to have skills such as communication, personal responsibility, and a better work ethic—skills well suited for the workplace. In fact, 55 percent of the respondents rated “communication skills” as the highest priority for educational focus (Tulchin & Muehlenkamp, 2007).
•Robert Half Technology commissioned a recent poll that illustrated that chief information officers believe the skills necessary for new employees have changed in the past five years—with more of an emphasis on project management, oral communication, writing, and getting along with others—in addition to the traditionally high-rated technical skills (Tucci, 2007, May 16).
As illustrated above, the importance of developing communication skills for the professional arena is undisputed.
Additionally, there is increasing evidence that communication skills are critical for citizen engagement as well. Susan Bickford, in her book Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship: The Dissonance of Democracy, suggests that democracy, by definition, necessitates communication: “It is precisely the presence of conflict and differences that makes communicative interaction necessary. This communicative interaction—speaking and listening together—does not do away with the conflicts that arise from uncertainty, inequality and identity. Rather, it enables political actors to decide democratically how to act in the face of conflict.” (Bickford, 1996, p. 2). Likewise, in his book The Magic of Dialogue: Transforming Conflict into Collaboration, Daniel Yankelovich (1999) suggests there are three key skills necessary for authentic citizen engagement: empathic listening, treating others as equal partners in dialogue, and examining unearthed assumptions without judgment. Such works point to the necessity of communication competencies in civic settings, and hence, the importance of teaching those competencies in classrooms where they are relevant.
Not only is it clear that communication is important, but in the past decade, there has been quite a bit of press suggesting that it is a skill that is lacking. Popular press articles lament students’ inability to speak clearly as proficient members of society. Take for example, the following:
•In a newspaper article in The Boston Globe (Zernike, 1999) titled “Talk is, Like, You know, Cheapened,” the issue of “mallspeak” (like, you know, goes . . .) is brought up as a critical problem for American democracy and education.
•The problem of inarticulateness was serious enough to be addressed in the legislative session—one senator even mockingly imagined whether Abraham Lincoln could have rallied the nation’s determination if the Gettysburg address began, ‘Four score, and like, seven years ago, you know, our forefathers, uh, brought forth, you know . . . .’”
•In the poem, “Totally Like Whatever,” Taylor Mali asks, “Have we just gotten to the point that we’re the most aggressively inarticulate generation to come along since, you know…a long time ago?” He encourages this generation, in the poem, to “speak with conviction and authority.” (http://www.taylormali.com/poems-online/totally-like-whatever-you-know/).
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