Academic disciplines which enjoy scholarly legitimacy at any university is very likely also the established disciplines. Their contents of education and the nature of their first courses are well structured and practiced by educators of each discipline. This is not the case for a discipline called communication studies.
The author surveyed a few dozens of communication-related university departments in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the United States and found that there is a great diversity for their very first course of teaching. Moreover, the first courses are more likely to be job-training in nature. The ten textbooks examined showed a consensus in content overwhelmed by speech communication. Their subject matters reflected no sign of converging the historical rivals between the mass communication school and speech communication school, a trend supposedly signified by a name change of SCA to NCA in 1997.
Ways in building the discipline and gaining academic legitimacy for communication studies are suggested. For Chinese scholars who are interested in this endeavor, a cultural-contextual approach to construct the essence of communication for the first course is urged.
中文關鍵詞
傳播學,課程內容,文化脈絡
英文關鍵詞
communication studies,course content,cultural-context