III. Additional Questions and Activities
QUESTIONS
The following questions may help you illustrate important points in the chapter and facilitate
students’ learning of this material. These questions can be used as:
• Homework questions
• Quizzes
1. What are the personal and professional benefits of public speaking?
• Accomplishing professional, personal, and academic goals
• Becoming more knowledgeable
2. Based on the benefits of public speaking:
• What skills do you hope to gain from this class?
• Are there other classes and out-of-school opportunities where you can use these skills?
3. Name and define the five canons of rhetoric.
Invention: the classical term for the process of selecting information to illustrate
or prove speech points
Arrangement: organizing a speech in ways that are best suited to the topic and
4. What is a public forum?
Called the agora by the Greeks and the forum by the Romans, the term public forum
5. What are the four categories of human communication?
6. What are the similarities between public speaking and other forms of communication?
• Key features of any communication are a skilled listener and a skilled conversationalist.
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7. Define and explain the elements of communication. (Students may want to incorporate the
elements of communication into an example or real-world situation.)
Source: person who creates the message
Encoding: physical process of converting thoughts into words
8. Define an audience-centered speaker.
Audience-centered speakers keep in mind the needs, values, attitudes, and desires of their
audience.
ACTIVITIES
I Heard It through the Grapevine
Purpose: To have last semester’s students help this semester’s students do their best in your class.
(Instructors need to do this at the end of one class in order to use it at the beginning of another.)
Instructions: Toward the end of the semester, ask your students to write a letter to next semester’s
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and the class without feeling that you are lecturing to them—or laying down the law. Also,
students will start to get to know one another and get used to speaking out loud.
The Silhouette Exercise
Purpose: To let students become familiar with their classmates, thereby lessening anxiety about
speaking in front of strangers. Students will also gain experience in speaking in class and begin
learning about visual aids.
Instructions: In this exercise students are asked to pair up and get to know one another. If it is
done in class, allow a minimum of fifteen minutes at the end of a class in preparation for doing the
activity in the next class session. Alternatively, students may be asked to meet outside class for
perhaps an hour (or more if they like) to prepare for the next class session. Ask students to
interview one another, taking care to ask about specific aspects of their lives, such as where they
have lived, what their hobbies and interests are, what their college experience has been like, and so
forth. For the next class session, they should come prepared to make a three- to five-minute speech
about the person they have interviewed. To illustrate aspects of that person’s personality, they
should bring the following items to class:
1. A large (9 × 12-inch or larger) sheet of paper on which a silhouetted profile is drawn
Chapter 1, p. 185
Depending on the instructor’s discretion, the students may either “decorate” the silhouette
in class or bring an already complete silhouette with them. Using this aid, students should give
Speech of Introduction
Purpose: To help students introduce themselves to the class and make each student memorable to
the instructor and their classmates.
Materials: 3″ × 5″ or 4″ × 6″ index cards
Instructions: Hand out index cards to each student. Ask students to write their name, contact
information, major, and one crazy, funny, interesting, or unique fact about themselves on the card.
What’s Your Number? . . . I’ll Call You: Learning the Model of Communication
Purpose: To encourage students to learn and remember the communication model.
Materials: Students will need two cell phones.
Instructions: The instructor asks for two student volunteers or picks two students to participate.
Each student gets a cell phone. Students are then instructed that they will act out a phone
conversation for two to three minutes. To help facilitate the conversation, the instructor can give
Chapter 1, p. 186
students the following scenarios from which to choose. (Alternatively, students can make up their
own scenarios.)
• You missed a class and need to call a classmate for notes.
• You are calling to ask someone on a date.
questions about the conversation. Questions should focus on the communication model.
• Who was the source in the conversation? Did this change? What role does the source play,
and how does he or she fulfill this role?
1. Deciding what you want to send to the receiver(s)
2. Translating that meaning into a message through the use of symbols that are commonly
3. Actually choosing a channel and sending the message
Instructors should follow the same format for each of the elements in the communication
model: source, encoding, receiver, decoding, message, channel, noise, shared meaning, and
feedback.
Once this process has been completed, if time allows, two more students should be handed
Making a Difference: The Benefits of Public Speaking
Purpose: To encourage students to consider the personal benefits of public speaking.
Instructions: Ask students to answer the following questions. Once the questions have been
completed, they can be turned in for credit or used to prompt classroom discussion.
1. Outside this public speaking class, where else in school or in life can you use public
speaking skills?
Identifying Public Speakers
Purpose: To help students identify effective and ineffective methods of public speaking.
Materials: Students must have access to some form of media such as television, movies, or
Instructions: Students will complete this assignment outside class. The teacher should instruct
students to watch someone on television or in a movie/video and then analyze why the person has
engaged in public speaking. This speaker can be someone in the news, politics, or business (a
public figure); a celebrity giving a speech; or even a person in a clip from a sitcom or a movie.
Students should answer the following questions.
4. What are the benefits of the speaker’s speech?
5. What, if any, speech mannerisms do you find particularly annoying about the speaker?
6. What speech mannerisms do you engage in that others may find annoying?
Additional Instructions: This assignment can also be used as a semester-long project.
Students can keep a speech journal in which they must watch at least one speech (or similar
speaking event) a week and answer the preceding analytical questions.
Chapter 1, p. 189
RECOMMENDED SUPPLEMENTARY RESOURCES
Copeland, L., Lamm, L., & McKenna, S. (1999). The world’s great speeches (4th ed.). Mineola,
NY: Dover.
Cusella, L. (1984). The effects of feedback source, message, and receiver characteristics on
intrinsic motivation. Communication Quarterly, 211–221.
Donovan, J. B. (1991). Power to the podium: The place to stand for those who move the world.
Vital Speeches of the Day, 58, 149–150.
Gregory, H. (2006). Public speaking for college and career. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Gudykunst, W. B., & Kim, Y. Y. (2002). Communication with strangers: An approach to
intercultural communication (4th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Haiman, F. S. (1986). Erosions of the first amendment: A challenge to speech communication.
Free Speech Yearbook, 1–10.
Infante, D., Rancer, A., & Womack, D. (2003). Building communication theory (4th ed.). Long
Grove, IL: Waveland Press.
Lustig, M. W., & Koester, J. (2005). Intercultural competence: Interpersonal communication
across cultures (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Martinez, S. (2004). Informative connections: Enhancing public speaking assignments with
service learning. Communication Teacher, 18, 23–25.
McFarland, J. L. (1984). The role of speech in self-development, self-concept, and decentration.
Communication Education, 231–236.
Chapter 1, p. 191
SUGGESTED WEBSITES
American Rhetoric: The Power of Oratory in the United States <www.americanrhetoric.com>
Chapter 1, p. 192