Task 2 – Explain the principles off effective

Task 2 – Explain the principles off effective communication

By Zain Riasat

General communication skills

“Understanding cultural difference, finding ways to engage an audience and being able to adapt to a situation.”

Wherever you go you are bound to come across cultural differences, these can range from variety of things such as the language people use (e.g. English people say "petrol" compared to Americans who say "gasoline") to the way they greet each other (English & Americans shake hands compared to Japanese who bow) and the way they eat (some Asian countries use chopsticks instead of knives and forks).

Adapting The rule is then to adapt yourself to your surroundings rather than

expecting them to treat you the way you expect.

If you were English and went to America and asked for “chips” you would get “crisps” in return because of the difference in meaning of the word.

Effective communication has a number of common elements. When communicating, remember the following:

1. Modulate your voice2. Correct terminology3. Suitable format4. Communication is unambiguous

Engaging audience When being taught by a teacher you sometiems think is the

technique the teacher using actually working for you. Most teachers in the school would create a Powerepint presentation and would run through it for the whole lessom ,with you expected to take notes. No one asks the question off am i actually gaining knowledge/ learning from this?

Another example would be Mr Wright’s way of teaching for our BTEC class. Instead of showing us a presentation he would upload a flipped video which covers the topics we need to know. For homework we would watch this video prior to our next lesson. So when we have our next lesson we would go over what was in the video etc.

https://sites.google.com/site/btecict/unit-30/task-4

Potential barriers The barriers to cultural differences are when you go abroad not to

offend there culture. You sometimes only realise cultural differences when you go abroad. That’s why it’s ideal to do some research on how they operate. So when your there you don’t end up offending there cultural ways.

Learning and researching about the country you are going is what you can do to prevent the barrier. Other examples are taking a translator with you or a small dictionary to help you communicate or when you have arrived just mention the fact that you don’t know much about their culture and apologise if you offend them in any way.

Interpersonal skills

It’s your ability to relate to others, these skills include such as not only how we communicate with others, but also our confidence, and our ability to listen and understand. Problem solving, decision making and personal stress management are also considered interpersonal skills.

There are a number of ways in which we physically communicate. The most common way is to enter into verbal exchanges. Sign language is a common method of communicating with those who suffer from hearing difficulties. The obvious difference is that the American system has been developed for only one hand whereas the English system uses two hands. As a reader you would suggest that you would know automatically which system your looking at.

Positive and negative language

Do you show a negative body language when someone's talking to you?

There are many ways to say negative things without making them sound bad and rude. Your body language makes the negative phrase sound good instead of bad. For example when you swear at your friend but your showing an “happy emotion”, your friend will realise you don’t mean it in a bad way.

Speaking slowly and doing it deliberately often shows the communicator you are frustrated. When someones shouting it gives you the indicator that they’re angry.

Positive body language is easily recognised because you know when someones interested in what your saying. For eg when in a interview your sitting with an open body, arms well positioned, sitting straight, showing eye contact etc.

Potential barriers

The key points to improve interpersonal communication is to start by removing the barriers to communication. Example of this are:

When you ring someone and you haven’t got any signal, you would move away from the area to get some signal. The barrier is you not being able to ring someone, to get rid of the barrier you would move away.

Background noises and distractions will esnure that you and your friend will not be able to fully concentrate. In general to make discussions and communciations more likely to be successful, you should try and eradicate all of the potential barriers.

Communicate in writing Spelling and grammar mistakes are common within everyone.

When writing letters, e-mails, etc mistakes are made.

A spellchecker checks the spelling of individual words. Spellcheckers are able to identify whether the letters in a word are missing or whether they have been switch around (in the wrong place).

The barriers to prevent this from happening are using spell check to review your work and making sure all corrections are made. You can also ask someone to proofread it for you. You should try to do this yourself once you’ve created a document of some sort. When using a computer or a laptop then software is available for you to use.

Identifying relevance

Being able to extract relevant information from writing is a skill. You have to decide which parts of the information you need and which you don’t.

1. Reading the document so you understand in general what it is about.

2. Read it again and make notes about the key points of the text, which is relevant to you.

3. Interpreting the relevant information into your own words.

As time goes on you will learn and be able to recognise what information is important and which can be ignored.

Note taking It is a great skill being able to take effective notes, particularly as

you progress through education, taking notes is time consuming. Taking notes in longhand is time consuming. For this reason many people use some form of shorthand.

Shorthand methods are written languages that use symbols that are quick to write as abbreviations. Examples are; Want = wnt, Don’t= dnt, Anymore= ne mre.

A key point about taking notes is that you should always write up notes in full as soon as possible after taking them, because then you might not remember what you meant. Especially if you made a lot of errors.