Oral and written communication apprehension in accounting students: Curriculum impacts and impacts on academic performance

Clare Gardner, Markus Milne, Carolyn Stringer and Rosalind Whiting

Accounting Education, 2005, vol. 14, issue 3, 313-336

Abstract: In the context of an accounting curriculum that has been significantly modified over the past decade in response to calls for skills development, this study investigates the impacts of curriculum on students' levels of communication apprehension. An emerging concern in accounting is that attempts made to improve students' communication skills may fail or be less effective for some students because such attempts do not improve, or may even exacerbate, students' anxiety about communicating, which in turn leads to poorer performance. The results from this New Zealand study show that students in their final year of study in which they are exposed to greater communication demands do not, on average, have higher levels of communication apprehension in earlier studies than their peers do. The levels of communication apprehension for final year students decline most markedly for those students starting with higher average levels of apprehension. The results fail to find any strong associations between levels of communication apprehension and students' abilities to advance in their studies or average levels of academic performance. One finding that opens up the possibility for further research, however, is that students' anxiety about communicating in interviews is not reduced.

Keywords: Communication apprehension; accounting education; New Zealand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/06939280500077269 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:accted:v:14:y:2005:i:3:p:313-336

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAED20

DOI: 10.1080/06939280500077269

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting Education is currently edited by Richard Wilson

More articles in Accounting Education from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().