Basic facts and context of communication process

1. What does it mean "communication"?

At the beginning, there is an important question of what communication realy means. In fact, we have to clarify some elementary words (or terms) connected to this topic as well.

Try to describe the meaning of following terms words according to your understanding (after that you can click on each question and read the definition):

It must be recognized that communication is a social phenomenon (one can not develop his/her human communication skills outside of a human group/society/community).

There are more targets of communication process:

1. information exchange
2. interaction of two or more individuals
3. meeting and sharing within a human group/community.

Finally, the most highest goal of quality interpersonal communication is understanding each other (which is not allways easy and obvious)!

2. Components and factors in communication

You probably know the basic elements of communication process (try to explain in a few simple words first, then you can click on each term and check your answers): 

The following process is allways being applied during the interpersonal communitation between two (or more) people:

• Ideological genesis (the sender must prepare the idea of a message)
• Encoding (the idea must be encoded into some kind of transferable form of message)
• Transmission (process of transfer of the message from sender to receiver)

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• Reception (active receiving of the message by receiver)
• Decoding (analyzing the message meaning)
• Reaction (answer in form of words or action)

3. Forms and types of communication

There are more different approachers to classification of forms and types of communication.

The most favourite is probably dividing communication in two main categories:

1. Verbal (spoken and written speech)
2. Non verbal (also "body language" - eye contact, facial expressions, gestures, proxemics, posturics, haptics, chronemics…)

Another classification can be based on a number of persons involved in a communication process - try to estimate how many people can we find in each of the following communication types (then you can click on each item and check your answer):