Page 14 - Effective Communication Skills by Dalton Kehoe

The Complex Layers of Face-to-Face Talk
Lecture 2

Interpersonal communication is a process whereby two or more people
within a particular context and who are aware of each other act together
to create and manage shared meetings. All of this goes on through
nonconscious display or conscious sending and receiving of messages
using a shared repertoire of both verbal and nonverbal symbols.

he model of face-to-face communication developed by
communication theorists and researchers over the past 50 years
Treveals what is actually happening as we talk with one another.
It turns out that what we say between the lines about ourselves and our
relationship to the other actually shapes the meaning of the lines we deliver
about the conversational topic. This is an important revelation because it
helps to explain why we are effective communicators in some situations and
not in others.
Lecture 2: The Complex Layers of Face-to-Face Talk
By the 1950s, we had put together a basic model that says every face-to-face
moment has a sender, a message, channels, and a receiver. We also added
two additional concepts: noise (anything that interferes with the sending
of a message) and feedback (the receiver’s immediate verbal response to
whatever the sender said). As the model began to work, scientists came to
recognize that what’s in people’s heads actually isn’t noise but rather their
personal experience. What the receiver got from our words may not be our
meanings but the meanings they put into the words as they were coming in.

What’s interesting about this is it shifts our focus from the sender to the
receiver. After 2,000 years of rhetorical analysis focused on the sender, we
put the receiver—the other—at the center of our analysis. As our thinking
and research progressed, we also realized we needed to move away from our
traditional emphasis on words to a focus on the relationship between words
and nonverbal displays in our analysis of the continuous and simultaneous

Àow of messages.

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