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of the youth “mall-speak” or “teenbonics,” reflecting students’ inability to craft arguments, make clear points, and to deal with crucial issues without fighting over them or avoiding them. This article also describes oral communication as an important competency for all students to have: “The premise is that writing skills and a degree from a prestigious institution are no longer enough. In order to face the world beyond college, students must speak effectively, be able to organize cogent arguments and be ready to function in an increasingly team-oriented workplace. It’s verbal competence-cum-confidence: understanding that mall-speak is fine when you’re with your buddies, but beginning a meeting with ‘I was, like, y’know, whatever’ just won’t cut it.”

      •The Chronicle of Higher Education article “Taking Aim at Student Incoherence” describes the problem of inarticulateness as a serious and substantive one—moving beyond the delivery issue of “mall-speak”—reflecting problems with students’ thinking. The article illustrates how attention to communication can address not only the issue of inarticulate and vernacular speech, but also students’ competencies in organization, critical thinking, argumentation, and learning of course material (retrieved from http://chronicle.com/colloquy/99/speech/background.htm).

      Clearly, the development of articulate communication is a critical concern. Integrating oral communication activities in the classroom can help alleviate this concern. Additionally, integrating oral communication activities into the classroom can also be beneficial to students’ learning. In higher education, there are a number of different initiatives that have recognized the importance of student oral participation to the learning endeavor. The rise of active learning as a viable, necessary, and important alternative to lecturing has been documented widely (e.g., Barnes, 1980; Helman & Horswill, 2002; Johnson & Johnson, 1974; Silvan, Wong Leung, Woon, & Kember, 2000; Slaven, 1995; Springer, Stanne, Donovan, 1999; Yoder & Hochevar, 2005). In fact, in many disciplines, there is clear research that active learning improves students’ performances on exams and other performance-based measures. In addition to increased content performance, active learning research has shown other benefits in terms of development of critical thinking skills, independent learning abilities, motivation for lifelong learning, and problem-solving skills. Other educational endeavors (e.g., cooperative learning, inquiry-guided instruction, service learning, etc.) have supported and built upon this basic premise—that getting students involved as active participants in the classroom (as opposed to passive recipients of content delivered through a lecture) is productive, valuable, and beneficial.

      Research on the “writing to learn” initiative has also documented that the active writing process enhances learning of course content (e.g., Herrington, 1981; Odell, 1980). Scholars in composition have studied this relationship between writing and learning for several decades, and such a history is well documented (Bazerman, Little, Bethel, Chavkin, Fouquette, Garufis, 2005). In articulating the unique characteristics of written communication that make it a valuable mode of learning, Janet Emig (1977) argued that “verbal language represents the most available medium for composing; in fact, the significance of sheer availability in its selection as a mode for learning can probably not be overstressed” (p. 122). Although Emig argued that writing, by its nature, was more useful than talking for the development of learning, research on the effects of oral communication—or the verbalization of material—on learning has shown, among other things, the following:

      •Vocalized stimuli are recalled more often than non-vocalized stimuli (Carmean & Weir, 1967; De Vesta & Rickards, 1971; Weir & Helgoe, 1968).

      •Adults are more likely to locate errors in the course of a computation if they verbalize the ways the errors could have occurred (Marks, 1951).

      •Vocalization during problem solving tasks produces better performance than not vocalizing (Davis, 1968; Gagne & Smith, 1962).

      •Students who studied verbal material in order to teach it to another student learned more than students instructed only to learn it (Bargh & Schul, 1980)

      •Students who give and receive explanations learn more than those who don’t (Webb, 1982; Webb, 2009).

      •Learning is increased when students are engaged in oral interaction with those who have a greater degree of knowledge and also communicate within the zone of knowledge held by the learner (Hatano, 1993; O’Donnell, 2006; Vygotsky, 1978).

      •Students who ask questions but are not answered suffer; in fact, this occurrence is a strong predictor of poor performance (Webb, 1982, 2009). This result suggests a relational dimension to the oral communication experience within the learning context: Students who ask, but do not receive a response, may be prone to quit asking.

      •Students restructure their knowledge when engaged in small-group discussions, affecting their learning positively. This restructuring was not observed as happening as effectively in individual learning. (O’Donnell, 2006; Schmidt, DeVolder, DeGrave, Moust, Patel, 1989; Webb, 2009).

      •Small-group discussion appears to activate prior knowledge, mobilizing existing knowledge and restructuring this knowledge by creating new relations between concepts in ways that make sense to the persons who produce the relations (Schmidt, et al., 1989)

      •Small-group discussion appears to be one way that learners can learn things that they do not relate to, or that are incompatible with existing beliefs, because it helps the learner become aware of his or her own perspective and the potential limitations of that perspective (Schmidt, et al., 1989; see also Hogan, Nastasi, & Pressley, 2000; Schwartz, 1995).

      •When students provide explanations and elaborate upon those explanations, there is increased learning (O’Donnell, 2006; Webb, Franke, De, Chan, Freund, Shein, & Melkonian, 2009).

      •In a meta-analysis of forty-two empirical research studies on discussion in the classroom, classroom discussion was shown to be “highly effective at promoting students’ literal and inferential comprehension” (Murphy, et al., 2009).

      As illustrated by the above points, students who have the opportunity to speak about their learning or hear how others have construed a problem or approached a solution benefit by seeing that there are multiple ways to approach an issue or problem, expanding the possibilities for exploring an issue in new ways. To realize that there are multiple paths to a solution or to come to understand the strengths and limitations of various paths is a gift that many students never receive. Discussions about life experiences—as related to course content—whether offered by students who have experienced discrimination or by students who have had a change of perspective, expand horizons in ways otherwise not possible. Speakers who struggle with apprehension and get the courage to make a claim and argue for it during a class discussion gain valuable experience that can move beyond the classroom. Oral communication assignments and activities have the potential of changing students: their learning, their outlook on life, their approach to interaction. Students’ engagement with communication activities can have significant effects on their learning, their ultimate success in the professional world, their interactions as citizens, and their interpersonal relationships. Therefore, we suggest it is important for you to consider additional ways in which you can use communication in your course. We advocate, though, that you do this in a way that will help you meet your teaching goals. For some, you might design high stakes, formal, graded assignments that focus on fostering professional communication competencies. For others, professional communication competencies might not be as relevant, so your focus might be on lower stakes, ungraded assignments in which students use communication competencies to learn course material. It is important to note that ungraded communication activities may only be low stakes in terms of grades, but they are in fact quite high stakes in the sense that we ask students to disclose their thoughts and opinions. Class discussion and small-group discussions, for example, are highly self-disclosive activities. We are asking students to disclose their thinking while it may still be quite unformed. We are asking students to make public their opinions and attitudes when those opinions and attitudes may not be shared. We are asking them to let others in on their degree of expertise, their ability to do close reading, their ability to analyze, etc. The stakes for how an individual is seen by others, and how that person sees him or herself are pretty high.

      Communication

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