III(2)_Unit_4_Communication_ST

Answer the following questions.

1.Who do you communicate with every day? Do you communicatewell with them? Why/Why not?

2.What forms of spoken and written communication do you likeusing? Why?

3.What problems can people have with the different forms of communication?

4.How do you think those problems can be solved?

5.When did you last have acommunication problem? Who was it with? What happened?

6.Who is the best communicator you know? Why?

To begin with …

To my way of thinking, … From my experience, …

In conclusion …

Iwas sitting in a suburban living room, speaking to a women's group that had invited men to join them for the occasion of my talk about communication between women and men. During the discussion, one man was particularly , full of lengthy comments and explanations. When I made the that women often complain that their husbands don't talk to them enough, this

man volunteered that he heartily agreed.

He toward his wife, who had sat silently beside him on the couch throughout the evening, and said,"She's the talker in our family."

Everyone in the room burst into laughter. The man looked puzzled and hurt. "It's true," he explained. "When I come home from work, I usually have nothing to say, but she never runs out. If it weren't for her, we'd spend the whole evening in " Another woman expressed a similar paradox about her husband: "When we go out, he's. If I happen to be in another room, I can always hear his voice above the others. But when we're home, he doesn't have that much to say. I do most of the talking."

Who talks more, women or men? According to the women talk too much.

… Yet study after study finds that it is men who talk more - at meetings, in mixed-group discussions, and in classrooms where girls or young women sit next to boys or young men. For example, communications researchers Barbara and Gene Eakins tape-recorded and studied seven university faculty meetings. They found that, with one exception, men spoke more often and, without exception, spoke for a longer time. …

Who talks more, then, women or men? The seeminglyevidenceis reconciled by the difference between what I call public and private speaking. More men feel comfortable doing "public speaking," while more women feel comfortable doing "private" speaking. Another way of capturing these differences is by using the terms report-talk and rapport-talk. For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and relationships. Emphasis is placed on displaying similarities and matching experiences. From childhood, girls criticize peers who try to stand out or appear better than others. People feel their closest connections at home, or in settings where they feel at home--with one or a few people they feel close to and comfortable with--in other words, during private speaking.

But even the most public situations can be approached like private speaking. For most men, talk is primarily a means to preserve and

hierarchical social order. This is done by exhibiting knowledge and skill, and by holding center stage through performance such as storytelling, joking, or imparting information. From childhood, men learn to use talking as a way to get and keep attention. So they are more comfortable speaking in larger groups made up of people they know less well--in the broadest sense, "public speaking." But even the most private situations can be

like public speaking, more like giving a

of communication is :

Communication

verbal 7%

tone of voice body 38% language

55%

Body language: People use body language without thinking (unconsciously) to communicate or the message to another person. We are also constantly dropping clues about what is going on in our head, sometimes without even knowing.

Tone of voice: Emotions are often given away not so much by what people are saying but how they say it. For example speaking loudly in short sentences can show aggression, speaking gently and giving smiles and encouragement can show caring.

When we communicate with other people it is not only our words that contain the meaning. An important part of that meaning comes from what is called 'non-verbal communication'. By this we mean facial expression; gestures with hands, arms, legs; the way we sit or stand; the way we touch other people; the distance we keep between ourselves and the people we are talking to; our dress and our appearance. All these say something to other people.

Facial expressions and gestures are used by everyone often spontaneously , even unconsciously. Smiling, for example, is found in most cultures as a sign of happiness or pleasure. Gestures such as pointing, waving, shaking or nodding the head are also widely used, although the gestures themselves do not always mean the same in every culture. I once asked a Portuguese student why bank officials in Lisbon seemed so dour – sorry Lisbon bank clerks, but it's true – and he told me that if they smiled too much they would not seem serious about theirwork.

Because many non-verbal messages are 'culture specific', they can cause a lot of misunderstanding between people from different backgrounds. Northern Europeans and Americans, for example, like to keep a certain 'personal space' between themselves and others and feel

uncomfortable if people come too close to them. In these samecultures it is considered impolite to stare , but Greeks, it is said, feel ignored if people do not stare at them in public. Europeans usually change their facial expression to show happiness, anger, boredom, sadness. For this reason they call oriental people 'inscrutable' because they change facialexpressionmuchless.

In styles of dress we also make important statements about ourselves. Dress codes vary greatly from one culture to another and it is easy to make mistakes about people's status if you don't know the cultural norm. In Mediterranean cultures bank officials and similar employees wear short-sleeved, open-neck shirts and no jackets. This casual dress would not be acceptable in northern Europe, where suits and ties are a sign of seriousness. Ambitious women in western cultures wear classic clothes in sober colours to indicate their dedication to career.

One of the main differences between verbal and nonverbal communication is that we are often not conscious of the expressions and gestures we use and so we are in danger of giving more information than we really want to, or even of giving a conflicting message with our body language to the one expressed in our words.