c (i) Cultural Codes: Essential
Accent: a way of pronouncing words that indicates the place of origin or social background of the speaker.
Appearance: the way somebody or something looks or seems to other people: an outward aspect of somebody or something that creates a particular impression.
Bodily Adornment: all the ways in which ‘furnish’ and decorate the body (clothing, jewellery, make-up, tattooing etc).
Dialect: a type of language use specific to a particular area within a country.
Facial Expression: the use of the face as an expressive instrument of communication.
Feedback: the response received by the sender to a message.
Gesture: a movement made with a part of the body in order to express meaning or emotion or to communicate an instruction.
Group: a collection of individuals.
Group cohesion: the tendency of a group to remain intact.
Groupthink: a feature of groups whereby individual performance is inhibited by the priorities of the group as a whole.
Ideal self: the kind of person we would like to be.
Idiolect (idiosyncratic dialect): An individual’s personal language register, it encompasses all our experiences and knowledge of language. The idiolect consists not only of vocabulary but also of the conventions of performance: all our words in all the forms, contexts and with all the differing emphasis we have given to them.
Interaction: communication between or joint activity involving two or more people.
Kinesics: body movement such as gesture, facial expression, posture, head nodding, orientation (where you put your self in relation to others): the study of the way meanings are communicated by bodily movement.
Language: an abstract system of communication using words and sentences to convey meaning.
Non-verbal communication: all communication other than that involving words and language.
Non-verbal leakage: when messages ‘slip out’ in spite of our attempts to control them.
Paralanguage: consists of the non-verbal elements that accompany speech. It includes the way we speak (also known as prosodic features); volume; pitch; intonation; speed of delivery; articulation; rhythm; the sounds we make other than language; laughter; crying; lip smacking; yawning; sighing; screeching; coughing; filled pauses such as ‘Mmmm’, ‘Ahhh’, Errr’, Ummm; unfilled pauses.
Persona: an adopted form of the self/identity.
Perception: the process of making sense of sensory data.
Personal Style: the specific features of our individual communication.
Posture: the way we sit, stand and hold our bodies.
Posture: the way we sit, stand and hold our bodies.
Proxemics: the study of how we use space and distance including seating arrangements, queuing and territoriality.
Proximity: the ways in which the space around us creates meanings for ourselves and others.
Role: a part we play.
Role model: a person whose behaviour, persona and/or appearance provide an influential model for others to follow.
Role model: a person whose behaviour, persona and/or appearance provide an influential model for others to follow.
School of thought: a set of beliefs or ideas held by a group of academics; a shared way of thinking about a particular issue.
Self-concept: is the idea we have of ourselves as individuals.
Self disclosure: the act of revealing ourselves, consciously or otherwise.
Self disclosure: the act of revealing ourselves, consciously or otherwise.
Self esteem: a measure of our own self worth.
Self-fulfilling prophecy: refers to how our belief that something is true can cause it to be so. For example, if we believe we are confident, we act as if we are confident, and so become confident.
Self image: the view we have of ourselves.
Self presentation: the conscious process through which self becomes text.
Verbal communication: communicating with words and language (as opposed to images, actions or behaviour).
c (ii) Cultural Codes: Useful
Adapters: almost unconscious gestures used to relieve stress or boredom; for example, drumming fingers on a desk or scratching the back of your head. Often, adapters signal nervousness or anxiety in situations such as giving a talk or being interviewed, so we do our best to control them.
Affective function: refers to the important role non-verbal communication has to play in establishing and maintaining relationships.
Assertiveness training: courses in assertiveness training seek to build confidence through the development of communication skills, which include the recognition and ability to resist manipulative non-verbal controls.
Bardic function: bards were the poets and minstrels of their day. They translated the everyday cultural concerns of the Middle Ages into verse. In their book Reading Television (1990), Fiske and Hartley argue that television plays a similar role today. Television has its own specialised language and it helps to define reality for us, reinforcing the dominant myths of our culture. The idea of the bardic function stresses continuity; television is playing a role that has always been played.
Body language: bodily mannerisms, postures, and facial expressions that can be interpreted as unconsciously communicating somebody's feelings or psychological state.
Code switching: refers to the way in which we may change between languages or dialects depending on who we are talking to.
Communicative Competence: the capacity to communicate; usually refers to the ability to use various communicative codes, verbal and non-verbal, appropriately in a variety of contexts.
Convergence: the way in which we adjust our language to make it more like the language style of the person we are addressing if we want to convey warmth, friendliness and empathy.
Divergence: moving language style away from the other person’s way of speaking can signal status or the desire to avoid intimacy.
Emblems: gestures with the specific cultural meanings attached, often used as direct substitutes for words.
Gaze: looking, eye-contact; a code of nvc.
Group dynamic: How the individuals in a group relate to one another and the group.
Hair/Hairstyle: a significant code of NVC.
Haptics: touching, physical contact such as holding, hitting, kissing, stroking, shaking hands, guiding.
Illustrators: these gestures reinforce the words of a speaker; for example, by pointing to something in a shop while saying ‘I’ll have one of those’.
Intergroup communication: communication between groups.
Interpersonal communication: communication between people at an individual level.
Interpersonal communication: communication between people at an individual level.
Intragroup communication: communication within a group.
Looking glass-theory: the idea that we base views of ourself on how we think others are perceiving us and judging us.
Mirror self: the tendency for us to see ourselves through a reflection of how others see us.
Occulesics: eye movement, length and direction of gaze, changes in pupil size.
Olfactics: smell, odour.
Orientation: the way we position ourselves physically in relation to others.
Phatic communication: aspects of language which serve to reinforce social relationships rather than to communicate information (e.g. ‘Have a nice day’).
Pitch: the intonation of speech, the way in which our voices may rise and fall.
Performance: communicative behaviour.
Received Pronunciation (RP): deals solely with the sounds of words (accent) and can be described as the prestigious speech of educated people. It is usually associated with London and the south-east and with the middle and upper classes. It is sometimes known as the Queen’s English, Oxford English or BBC English.
Reflexivity: describes what it is to be self-conscious, to be self-aware and to reflect on who you are, what you’re doing and how you present yourself in the world. It is a feature of much of contemporary communication that it is similarly conscious and aware. It is self-reflexive. In this way, for example, we are used to seeing films about the making of films, advertisements that play with the conventions of advertisements, and comedies that refer to the ‘rules’ of comedy.
Skin: a significant code of NVC.
Smell: a significant code of NVC.
Sociolect: a social dialect.
Staging: the way in which we manipulate the contexts of interpersonal communication (the physical locations, the props, the costume).
Style shifting: this refers to the way in which we may modify our use of the same dialect within different situations. For example, we may use more formal language at an interview than we would use at home.
Teams: those we communicate ‘alongside’.
Touch: a significant code of NVC.
Touch: a significant code of NVC.
Tone: the way somebody says something as an indicator of what that person is feeling or thinking.
Timbre: the quality of a speech sound that comes from its tone rather than its pitch or volume.
Transactional analysis: an approach to understanding and ultimately improving interpersonal communication introduced by Eric Berne in his book Games People Play (1968). The essence of Eric Berne’s theories of personality is that each of us at any one time has the option of adopting one of three ego states: ‘the child’, ‘the parent’ and ‘the adult’. These are not stages of maturity, they are options within all of us; a 6-year-old can adopt a parent ego state in conversation with a 30-year-old in ‘child’ ego state.
Uses and gratifications theory: this is an approach to understanding the role of mass communication in society. The basic premise runs as follows. We all have various needs and desires, such as needs for information, entertainment and social interaction which media texts (such as television programmes, video games, magazines and newspapers) help us to fulfil. Hence use the mass media to gratify our needs.
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