Mastering Communication: Skills, Channels, and Social Meaning
Communication Skills: Interpreting Speeches
Effective communication requires a minimum level of understanding. To achieve this, individuals must possess certain communication skills—the capabilities that enable a person to connect with others, comprehend, and relate. These capabilities include managing gestures, tones, expressions, and nonverbal codes appropriate for each situation, as well as the knowledge and use of both oral and written language.
Communication Skills:
- Language Proficiency: This refers to a person’s ability to encode and decode a language.
- Paralinguistic Skills: These refer to a person’s ability to encode and decode nonverbal messages, such as signs, gestures, tones of voice, and images.
- Technical Skills: This involves the interpretation of specialized codes, which requires understanding how to respond to different situations, such as operating machines or appliances and comprehending specialized languages.
- Cultural Competence: This is the ability for humans to understand the world around them, adapt to its rules, and know the social values, customs, and rules of coexistence within their community. Culture encompasses sets of customs, experiences, ways of interacting with the world, and patterns of feeling and acting in a society, often defined as a value system.
- Ideological Competence: This encompasses inherent biases (preconceived notions). We often tend to think that “all” individuals with certain traits “are” a certain way. This can be either an advantage or an obstacle to achieving understanding.
- Emotional Determinations: These are all sensitive, psychological, or emotional constraints that may affect the production and reception of discourse.
Discourse Constraints: Channels and Conditions
The communication channel is not merely a technical support or an external element. Each tool used for communication imposes specific codes and formats, requiring particular skills for effective use.
When encoding a message, a person must consider contextual elements to ensure their ability to articulate and transmit the intended discourse to others (for example, we often need silence to ensure our voice is heard). Production conditions are variables independent of the person encoding the message, yet they can significantly constrain or even prevent the discourse from being realized. Similarly, recipients will also be in varying environmental conditions that affect their ability to relate to and recognize speech. Recognition conditions are external variables that influence how receivers decode a message.
Social Values and the Production of Meaning
Conversation often emerges to resolve conflict; it is a comfortable, everyday dialogue, though sometimes with a subtle agenda. Noise can be defined as an external factor affecting senders and receivers. For instance, a motorcycle obstructing a dialogue between two friends is an external factor making communication difficult. However, in a conversation between two people, ‘noise’ can also refer to one person’s lack of effort to understand the other, perhaps due to anger or other internal factors. The overall meaning of communication often arises from a dynamic interplay or even a conflict of interpretations. This overall sense encompasses what words mean, along with underlying values and attitudes. Something gains meaning when a person invests in it and when important elements coincide. Meaning itself is fluid, changing as humans modify their communication pacts and understandings.