TEACHING COMMUNICATION SKILLS IN THE CONTEXT OF INTRODUCTORY SOCIOLOGY.

Communication is an important social fact that is critical to the existence and maintenance of social life and to the individual's development and self-concept as well as a critically important skill for the everyday functioning of individual members of society. It is maintained in this paper that colleges and each college instructor are responsible for helping students to develop their communication skills. This development in turn will help them to improve their critical thinking skills because the two skills are linked. The classroom is viewed as the natural setting for such activity. To facilitate development of communication skills (writing, speaking, listening), a unique pedagogy is described that includes a small-group exploratory discussion, a summary of the discussion written in a memorandum format, and small-group comparison of memoranda for accuracy and completeness of recall. Data on the experimental testing of the pedagogy across disciplines are presented. Implementation of the pedagogy in an introductory sociology course is described. Results suggest that this pedagogy is more effective than conventional pedagogies in facilitating development of communication skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]