ABSTRACT
Speech is a social necessity; it arises only in social situations; it can never be one-sided, but like the wordless communications between people who like, tolerate or dislike each other must involve always a two-way relationship. For the speech specialist in a teacher’s training department this social aspect of speech is particularly important. In studying how to handle speech problems should do well to observe what has been going on in other fields during the past thirty years. For teachers the private elocution lesson has only a limited efficacy. The speech specialist, faced with the problem of tackling eighty or so individual students, and obliged against his will to combine them into classes, may find, as Dr. Pratt did in the medical field, that the policy of despair proves to be the policy of hope, and that he can achieve more with his groups than he could with private pupils.
