Unit 6. Interpersonal Communication. 117

Task 1. New York to Detroit.................................................. 117

Task 2. Romantic Stories....................................................... 118

Task 3. Love Poems............................................................... 122

Task 4. Postnuptial Depression............................................. 124

Task 5. History of a Disturbance........................................... 127

Unit 7. Group Communication........................................................ 131

Task 1. Winnie-the-Pooh........................................................ 131

Task 2. King’s Cross.............................................................. 135

Task 3. The Destructors......................................................... 135

Task 4. The Great Mouse Plot................................................ 136

Task 5. Honorary Gun Moll................................................... 136

Unit 8. Mass Communication.......................................................... 137

Task 1. President Bush’s Radio Address............................... 137

Task 2. Iraq Needs Capitalism, Not Foreign Aid................... 139

Task 3. Greenhouse Emissions............................................... 141

Task 4. Jimmi Carter’s Nobel Prize Lecture........................... 148

Task 5. Mending Broken Hearts............................................. 153

Task 6. Here’s What He’s Hiding from You.......................... 159

Unit 9. The Role of Communication Strategies in Interaction....... 161

Task 1. Louise........................................................................ 161

Task 2. The Perfect Murder.................................................... 162

Task 3. The Lumber Room..................................................... 162

Task 4. Clean Sweep Ignatius................................................ 163

Task 5. Cheap at Half the Price.............................................. 163

Task 6. No! A Thousand Times, No!.................................... 164

Reference.......................................................................................... 167

INTRODUCTION

This practice book has been designed for specialists in communication and is aimed at providing them with skills requisite for the analysis of communicative behaviour in different situations and spheres of human activity. The book is framed for individual work at home and in-class discussion and can assist the senior students of MSLU majoring in communication in the process of solving such practical tasks as disclosing the reasons of communicative failures and improving unsuccessful communication. It can also be of interest to advanced students of English at other universities.

The focus of the discipline “Interpretation of Communicative Behaviour” is to enable the students to adequately identify various communicative episodes and components of communicative situations presented in authentic English texts, estimate the results of the participants’ communicative behaviour and improve faulty communication.

The book covers essential topics associated with modern understanding of communication and its analysis, such as models and perspectives of analyzing communication, decoding messages (perception), encoding messages (spoken language and nonverbal communication), types of communication (interpersonal, group and mass communication), communicative strategies and tactics.

Each unit begins with the section Recap the Following Theoretical Issues that suggests some topics for revision. As the theoretical aspects under consideration are familiar to the fifth-year students of MSLU majoring in communication, theoretical material as such is not included in the book. The discipline focuses on practice in the first place. Nevertheless, revision of theory is an essential element of studying process as the practical analysis is carried out in accordance with a certain model/theory of communication.[1]

The practical tasks are divided into Identifying Aspects of Communication, Discussion, Follow-up and Problem-solving sections. These practical assignments (except for Problem-solving) are based on the texts for analysis and the corresponding theory. They are to be prepared at home and discussed in class. Identifying Aspects of Communication encourages the students to figure out and describe the main elements of the communicative episode under consideration. Discussion poses questions about a contestable issue on which the students should express their own opinion. Follow-up provides tasks that guide the students in the process of making mini presentations relying on the discussed texts and the requisite theory. Problem-solving is associated with role-playing and modelling particular communicative situations. In these tasks the students are encouraged to share their personal experience connected with the communicative phenomenon under study.

UNIT 1

Defining Communication

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14