Text A Components of Communication

Communication is related to both“communion”and“community”. It comes from the Latin“communicare”, which means, “to make common”or“to share”. The basic assumption is: communication is a form of human behavior derived from a need to connect and interact with other human beings. Therefore, communication can simply refer to the act and process of sending and receiving messages among people.

Communication can take place on different levels and can be classified into several types. It is the process of understanding and sharing of meaning in pairs or in small groups. What, then, constitutes such interaction? The following short dialogue can be used to illustrate the components of an interpersonal interaction:

A and B are two students in the classroom a couple of minutes before the class begins:

A: Hi, Bob, are you doing anything tonight?

B: No, why?

A: I've got two tickets for The Butterfly Effect. Like to go with me?

B: Sure. (The instructor came in the classroom, so B lowers his voice) When?

A: Shh, let's talk after class.

In this dialogue, A wants to invite B to go to see the movie with him. A starts the dialogue and he is the source — the point at which information or interaction originates. A organized his idea and puts it into words—verbal code, such a process is called encoding. A expresses his idea— the message by way of talking, i. e. the verbal channel. B, the receiver of the message, after interpreting the message through the process of decoding, gives his response to the coming information. The entrance of the teacher interferes with the talk and is considered“noise”of the interaction. A knows that his invitation has been accepted and decides to talk about it later. Here the receiver B's response to the message enables the source or sender A to understand how his message has been taken, such information is called feedback.

Feedback in fact makes it possible for the source or sender to adjust himself so as to proceed with the interaction. Feedback and response are related because the receiver's response is a normal source of the sender's feedback. And the dialogue between A and B takes place in the setting or context of the classroom. The context could be as small as a classroom or a dinner table, and at the same time it could be as big as the entire cultural environment. Different context often calls for different communicative behavior. Intercultural communication and intracultural communication consist of the same components, but in the former the sender and the receiver of the message come from different cultures and each of them may have very different ways of encoding and decoding as well as reactions to the environment or situation of communication event. The following diagram shows the components and the process of a communication event.