LESSON 5: EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION SKILLS

SPEAKING SKILLS & WRITING SKILLS

SPEAKING SKILLS

✓ Questioning and answering are two of the most useful speaking skills students
have to develop.

✓ The Art of Questioning – Knowledge of the question words and mastery of the
construction of interrogative sentences.
• WH – questions
• Yes/No – questions

✓ Recitation – more often than not, it comes in the form of answering questions
raised by the teacher.
• Concise and straightforward than long and indirect…

✓ Oral reports – classified based on the mode of delivery, duration or time limit,
topic, purpose, or occasion. (Menoy, 2007)

Mode of Delivery

✓ Manuscript speech – read speech

✓ Memorized speech – memorized
✓ Impromptu speech – on-the-spot
✓ Extemporaneous speech – short preparation, with or without notes.

✓ Duration or time limit

• 3-30 mins = short
• 60 mins and above = long

✓ Topic
• Biological
• Sociological
• Psychological
• Political etc.
 ✓ Purpose
• Informative – giving information
• Demonstrative – showing a process and the like.
• Instructive – giving orders
• Persuasive – letting the audience to take an action.

✓ Occasion
• Formal – lecture in a classroom setting
• Informal – round-table meeting or unstructured discussion

✓ Oral interpretation is a skill useful in literature classes.

✓ You should read with proper intonation, phrasing, and pausing.

✓ In speaking, people differ in many ways.

✓ Because of their various backgrounds or origins, they differ not only in their
physical attributes but also in their mental, social, economic, moral and behavioral
traits.

EXAMPLES:
POINT OF COMPARISON LOCAL NORMS FOREIGN NORMS
MENTAL Emotionally-driven, Americans: Independent
Religious, Hospitable and Individualistic
SOCIAL Family-Oriented, Humor Americans: Directness,
and Positivity, Faith and Friendliness, Time Sensitive
Religion

WRITING SKILLS

✓ Writing is the most difficult to develop.

Mastery rules in…

• GRAMMAR - The study of the classes of words, their inflection, functions, and
relations in the sentence.
• MECHANICS - The details about how something works or is done.
 • ORGANIZATION - The act or process of planning and arranging the different
parts of an event or activity.

and know the principles in…

• UNITY - A way of combining the parts in a work of art or literature so that they
seem to belong together.
• EMPHASIS - A forceful quality in the way something is said or written
• COHERENCE - Integration of diverse elements, relationships, or values

STAGES OF WRITING

• Prewriting
• Writing
• Post-writing
1. Developing a topic
2. Identifying audience and purpose
3. Organizing or outlining
4. Researching or data gathering

Outlining

• One of the prewriting skills

• Serves as guide to writing, a student has to make one before indulging to writing.
• Outlines are classified into three:
a. Topic outlines
b. Sentence outlines
c. Paragraph outlines
• Alphanumeric or decimal system can be used

Topic Outlines - Which the entries are words, phrases, and clauses.

• Has four (4) to six (6) levels.

Sentence Outlines - which the entries are sentences.

• Periods are placed at the end of entries.

• Two (2) to four (4) levels
Paragraph Outlines - Which the entries are topic sentences (sentences that contain the
central ideas of paragraphs).

• Periods are placed at the end of entries.

• Has only one (1) level.

Writing

5. Drafting – A version of something (such as a document) that you make before you
make the final version

• Writing is almost always an activity assigned to students in all disciplines.

• To be able to write effectively, one should be knowledgeable in these respects.
a. Format
b. Patterns of organization
c. Patterns of development
d. Principles of composition
e. Forms of discourse

Post-writing

6. Copy reading revising

7. Proofreading

• Paraphrasing and summarizing are writing skills associated with note-taking.

INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

❖ Situated between individuals or groups of different linguistic and cultural origins.

- LANQUA (Language Network for Quality Assurance)

❖ A form of communication that aims to share information across different cultures

and social groups.
❖ Sometimes used synonymously with cross-cultural communication.
❖ Wide range of communication processes and problems that naturally appear within
an organization or social context made up of individuals from different…
• Religion • Ethnic
• Social • Educational background
 ❖ Ethnic group – e.g. between Waray and Mangyan.
❖ Language – between a Thai and a South Korean.
❖ Economic status – between a rich and poor man.
❖ Affiliation in social/political Institutions – between Conservative and Republican.
❖ Profession – between a teacher and an engineer.
❖ Religion – between a Catholic and a Born-again Christian
❖ Educational background – between a high school undergraduate and a PH. D. holder.
❖ Gender – between a man and a transgender.
❖ Age – between an old man and a teen-age girl.

Intercultural Communication Skills by CILT (National Centre for Languages)

❖ Tolerance of Ambiguity – The ability to accept lack of clarity and to be able to

deal with ambiguous situations constructively.
❖ Behavioral Flexibility – The ability to adapt your own behavior to different
requirements and situations.
❖ Communicative Awareness – The ability to identify and use communicative
conventions of people from other cultural backgrounds and to modify your own
forms of expression correspondingly.
❖ Knowledge Discovery – The ability to acquire new knowledge of a culture and
cultural practices and to use that knowledge in real-time communication and
interaction.
❖ Respect for Otherness– The quality that includes curiosity and openness and
readiness to suspend disbelief about other cultures and belief about your own.
❖ Empathy– The ability to understand intuitively what other people think and how
they feel in given situations.

Recap
✓ Speaking Skills
✓ Writing Skills
✓ Intercultural Communication
LESSON 6: FUNCTIONS OF COMMUNICATION
FUNCTIONS OF COMMUNICATION
➢ REGULATION AND CONTROL
➢ SOCIAL INTERACTION
➢ EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION
➢ MOTIVATION
➢ INFORMATION

1. CONTROL
- Control means the power to regulate, direct, or dominate.
• Communication is an effective tool to control the response of other people.
• It may happen in a formal or an informal setting.

• In a formal setting, control comes from authority hierarchies that give guidelines for
you to follow.
✓ For instance, your teacher can control what you do inside the classroom by giving
you a schedule of activities or instructions to comply with.

• On the other hand, an informal setting sets the stage for various casual conversations
that may influence the moods and behaviour of the recipient.

• An insightful comment, a greeting, or a compliment may boost the morale of the person
you are conversing with. This is an informal way of controlling behaviour

Example of Control
“Please wear your I.D.,” the school guard politely asked when you reached the gate.
You took out your I.D. from your pocket, pinned it in your uniform, and thanked the
guard for allowing you to enter. The guard gave you a warm smile.
➢ Watch: The Girl Who Silenced the World for Five Minutes

2. SOCIAL INTERACTION
• It is the most familiar and the primary reason why people wants to
communicate.
• It allows people to be connected with one another.
• Communication can be used to produce social interaction. In our daily course of
living, we develop and maintain bonds, intimacy, relations and associations.
 • To establish rapport, do not talk about your problems unless you are asked or
you have a valuable lesson to share

3. EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION
• The speaker appeals to the listeners feelings and emotions to encourage him or
her to act in a particular direction.
• Human always need to express their emotions verbally and nonverbally. Emotions
are a central part of who we are. Beyond thinking about the things and people in
our world, we feel about them and about ourselves
➢ Watch: The Gettysburg Address – Abraham Lincoln 1863

4. MOTIVATION
• Motivation is defined as the power that drives a person to accomplish a desired
goal.
• The purpose of the speaker here is to persuade or try to persuade another
person to change his/her opinion, attitude, or behaviour.
➢ Watch: Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

5. INFORMATION
• It is used when the speaker wants to make others aware of certain data,
concepts, and processes that may be useful to them.
• It is considered to be the principal function of communication because all the
other functions information exchanges.

How to give correct information

a. ALWAYS TELL THE TRUTH

- If your goal is to make the receiver make the right decision about
something, he or she should know the facts as they really are, not as they
appear to be.
b. BE SPECIFIC
- Specificity is clarity. Give every important detail whenever possible to help
the receiver create a mental picture of the information you are trying to
convey.
c. BE BRIEF AND DIRECT TO THE POINT
- To avoid clouding your information with doubts and confusion you must
express the intended message in as few words as possible. Avoid being
verbose.
How to avoid verbosity

1. Eliminate redundant words

2. Eliminate filler words
3. Use contractions

d. AVOID USING JARGONS

- Jargons are special words used by a particular group or profession.
Oftentimes, these words are unfamiliar and difficult for others to
understand.
e. BE PRECISE
- Precision in language means using the exact words at the right time for the
right kind of receiver
➢ Watch: Malala Addresses UN General Assembly UNICEF