The petrified pedagogy of speech delivery: reexamining the Canon of speech delivery through the lens of nonverbal communication research

ABSTRACT

Speech delivery pedagogy has both changed dramatically over the last several centuries and remained remarkably fixed over the last 100 years. In the early 1900s, this pedagogy underwent a dramatic shift from an “elocutionist approach” to a “natural approach” to speech delivery. Since that time, speech delivery pedagogy has remained in an essentially petrified state while our understanding of nonverbal behaviors – the very behaviors at the heart of speech delivery – has grown exponentially. In this essay, we draw upon the expansive nonverbal communication literature to argue for a new approach to teaching speech delivery – an approach we refer to as the interconnected approach. This interconnected approach re-emphasizes the importance of speech delivery, structures the topic of speech delivery around coherent nonverbal clusters, and acknowledges the unnatural pathway to developing a natural speech delivery.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2015 Eastern Communication Association Conference in Philadelphia, PA.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ These six texts were selected based upon their status as top-selling texts in the public speaking marketplace. These specific texts were identified to the authors as top sellers through personal correspondence with the Senior Editor for Communication texts at Cengage Learning.

² Consistent with this essay’s advocacy for the importance of speech delivery, the study also found that independent judges responded more to the nonverbal presence of the various speakers than to the content of their speeches.