ABSTRACT
Communication apprehension (CA) provides one reference to the anxiety or fear about communication, constituting a fundamental challenge for all classrooms. Scholars (Dwyer, 1998; McCroskey, 1977) feel that the level of CA felt by a student has implications for numerous educational issues. This chapter considers a number of meta-analyses examining the impact, implication, and various methods of remediation for CA. The term CA crops up in a multitude of ways when considering the various manifestations of the fear about communication. In theater, the fear of performance or evaluation is referred to as stage fright. Musical instructors refer to the fear of performance or “performance anxiety” as that emotional reaction that interferes with recitals. Athletes call the feeling having butterflies in the stomach before a competition. Interpersonal communication scholars often refer to the issues of CA by calling it shyness or reticence. Clinical psychologists label the experience a phobia or social anxiety and PsychINFO uses the heading
“Fear of Public Speaking,” as a keyword to index published information. Whatever the context or genesis, the issue of a person feeling anxiety about the act of communication appears universal and crosses culture and context. For the purposes of this chapter, CA is used to denote the family of terms represented by that general fear. The issues of CA are probably among the oldest issues to which social scientific research was applied in the discipline (Knower, 1937). The fear about communication and the conquering of that anxiety represents one of the fundamental goals or objectives for any skill-based communication course, but the implications of this anxiety extend to many other arenas across the curriculum.
