Models of Communication

Recap the following theoretical issues. A. Models of communication. 1. What is a model? How are models created? 2. Speak on the necessity to create a model in order to describe a phenomenon. 3. What do different communicative models focus on? 4. Dwell on the main disadvantages of models.     B. The psychological model. 1. Recall the elements of the psychological model of communication (sender/receiver, message, channel, encoding/decoding, mental set, noise, feedback). How does this model define communication? 2. According to the psychological model, in what case is communication considered to be unsuccessful? 3. What are the ways of improving faulty communication? 4. Dwell on the drawbacks and limitations of the psychological perspective.     C. The social constructionist model. 1. How is communication viewed from the angle of the social constructionist perspective? 2. Recall the cultural tools employed by the social constructionist perspective (symbolic codes, cognitive customs, cultural traditions, shared rules and roles). How is communication conducted according to the social constructionist model? 3. In what case is the communicative process considered to be a failure from the point of view of the social constructionist perspective? Dwell on the necessary preconditions for the communicative process to be successful. 4. What are the drawbacks of the social constructionist perspective?     D. The pragmatic model. 1. What is the main focus of the pragmatic model? 2. Recall the elements of the pragmatic model (partners, individual moves, an interact, payoffs, interdependence). How do we understand communication from the angle of the pragmatic perspective? 3. Prove that communicative process presupposes interdependence of the partners. 4. What are the ways to achieve success in the communicative process? 5. What are the disadvantages of the pragmatic perspective?   E. Hymes’ SPEAKING model. 1. Recall the elements of context according to Hymes’ model (speech community, speech situations, speech events, speech acts). 2. What are the specific elements of communication specified by Hymes? How should they be singled out and described (situations, participants, ends, act sequences, keys, instrumentalities, norms, genres)?

Task 1. Psychology

Ex. 1.Identifying aspects of communication. Read the story “Psychology” by K. Mansfield and get ready to dwell on the main elements of the communicative episode described in the text.

1. Do the participants of communication have similar mental sets?

2. Is this communication successful? If not, at what stage of the encoding/decoding process does this failure occur?

3. How could this communicative failure have been avoided?

4. What can be classified as communicative noise in this episode?

5. How does the tone of communication change when the woman switches to a different communicative channel (starts writing the letter)?

Ex. 2. Discussion. Express your own opinion about the following: a) “There was another way for them to speak to each other.” What way is meant? Is it a more effective means of communication? b) The problem of discrepancy between one’s intentions and their realization.

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