AREA A - ORAL COMMUNICATION

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Area Requirements . All courses certified for Oral Communication must meet all of the following criteria in addition to the criteria specified for all General Education courses (pages 6-8). Courses in Oral Communication should consciously aim to convey to students the goals and guidelines articulated in CSUSM's Mission Statement.

1. Goals and Objectives

• Students will have an understanding of the psychological bases and the social significance of communication, with special emphasis on the roles of public communication in a free society.
• Students will develop proficiency in composing and delivering extemporaneous public presentations on socially significant and intellectually challenging topics.
• Students will develop proficiency in critical and analytical listening.
• Each student will develop a sense of her or his own voice, which means speaking with confidence in public forums in ways that reflect her or his unique perspective and identity.
• Students will understand and appreciate a range of public speaking styles and forms of eloquence representative of diverse cultural gender, and ethnic groups.
• Each student will develop a sense of the ethical responsibilities of the public speaker and will learn to respect the freedom of expression of all members of the community.

2. Course Requirements

Major speech assignments. Each course shall require students to present at least three major speech assignments. These presentations, delivered before a full classroom audience, shall be individually graded and, taken together, should account for at least 50 percent of the course grade. They shall require the student to address an intellectually challenging topic of broad social relevance, linked to the division or College offering the course, and to develop an original presentation of sufficient length to demonstrate the major skills of the course. The assignments shall require the student to undertake substantial research from a variety of sources and to synthesize the evidence to support or explicate the points of her or his presentation. These speeches shall be presented in the extemporaneous mode, allowing for adaptation to audience response. Whenever possible, the student should have the opportunity to develop further and clarify her or his ideas through a question and answer exchange with audience members. Each student shall receive feedback on these assignments addressing a full range of rhetorical criteria such as content, organization, language, and delivery.

Additional speaking assignments. Each course shall include additional oral assignments and exercises designed to enable students to master the skills required for the major assignments and/or to develop skills in additional forms of public speaking. Each student will have at least one opportunity to revise and improve a speech following formative feedback from the instructor and peers. Each student will have some collaborative experience in the social construction of oral messages. This may take the form of working with a peer support group, preparing a group presentation, engaging in debate, or participating in a structured individual conference with the instructor.

Written assignments. Each of the three major speech assignments shall require full sentence outlines or argumentative briefs containing sufficient detail to show the relationships among the points and sub-points of the presentation and the evidence used to support those points. Additional written assignments should include appropriate papers, bibliographies, exercises, written speech analyses and/or written peer critiques.

Examinations. Each course shall include readings and lecture/discussions to introduce students to the study of communication as the process of human symbolic interaction focusing on the communicative process from the rhetorical perspective: analysis, reasoning and advocacy; organization; the discovery, critical evaluation and reporting of information. To demonstrate mastery of this conceptual material, each course shall include at least 100 minutes of written examinations.

Class size. The appropriate class size is 17 to 20 students. In no case, however, shall enrollments exceed 25. For sections that are specifically designed for limited English speaking students, the enrollment limit shall be 20.

Special or supplementary assistance. Some students may require special assistance, or more assistance, in meeting course goals than the regular course can provide. In such cases, faculty are urged to refer the student to the appropriate program for special or supplementary assistance. Subject to adequate university funding, enrollment in a program designed to provide special or supplementary assistance may be required when the need for such assistance is demonstrated through an assessment procedure that has been approved by the General Education Committee.

Technology and Information Literacy. Courses approved for Oral Communication shall include an assessable Information and Computer Literacy component that will require students to develop an understanding of the core information sources and literature of the discipline.

3. Evaluation and Assessment

Assignments. Student progress will also be evaluated throughout the semester by grades and comments on student essays.

Guidelines. Any department offering a course to meet the requirement shall for each such course write detailed course guidelines in accordance with the criteria above. These guidelines shall be submitted to the Academic disciplines offering the course and distributed each semester to all faculty members teaching that course.

Assessment. Courses proposed for Oral Communication shall address the question of assessment and shall identify the means by which faculty will assess student learning.

4. Faculty Qualifications

Faculty should have graduate-level training or college-level teaching experience in an oral communication discipline (e.g., rhetorical or communication theory applied to face-to-face communication). Courses will be assigned a librarian as a resource person to facilitate the information literacy and library use components.