A Dynamic Approach To Response Communication

Known as behavioral psychology, behaviorism is confined to a mechanical and isolated description of observable behavior, and the attacked weakness has prevented it from unveiling the secrets of how people actually behave for real purposes. It is not suggested, however, that behaviorism be discarded as a whole; in fact, it can, when the concept of"response"is borrowed and revised with the consideration of people's activity and the ever-changing nature of context, provide explanations for the nature of communication in an efficient way.To natural communication, the accomplishment of meaning construction is a joint and finely tuned achievement of communicators in active responses: after implicitly reacting to messages and intentions from external and internal situations, language users strategically choose to offer explicit responses in a verbal or nonverbal channel with particular information and goals. Accordingly, communication can be defined as a dynamic process in which participants actively respond to message and intention with respect to particular contexts and communicators are therefore active respondents who verbally or nonverbally react to message and intention in contexts, with the one who initiates a turn as Respondent 1 (R1) and the one who reacts in the next turn as Respondent 2 (R2).Intention in communication, which is supposed to guide explicit responses, is closely observed. Based on the intention analysis from Sperber and Wilson (1995), the author reexamines one's intention in communication: Informative Intention (II) (or ostension intention) and Communicative Intention (CI) (or goal intention): the former is the integration of informative intention (ii) and communicative intention (ci) argued by Sperber and Wilson (1995) as to make it mutually manifest to other respondents the set of assumptionsâ… that he/she is making manifest or more manifest; the latter is to attain certain goals through mutual manifestation of his/her II. In this way, when a person intending to communicate gets responses relevant to his/her CI, he/she is a successful communicator; otherwise, his/her communication is a failure.Different from traditional researches that tend to focus on language as verbal, the present dissertation emphasizes the importance of studying the nonverbal aspects of language and tries to investigate how both verbal and nonverbal tools serve human communication. As far as categories of nonverbal communication are concerned, nonverbal behavior is classified in the present dissertation from three aspects: response in body language, response in environmental language and response in paralanguage. To better interpret how language use is integrated with contextual factors, the author also finds it reasonable to research context as objective context and subjective context with new analysis of their components.For the response approach to be better utilized in communication analysis, an analytical framework is established and employed to account for both verbal and nonverbal communication in classroom. Strategy and context analyses about verbal and nonverbal responses present a clear picture of the interaction among respondents and offer a new insight in incorporating participants'contributions. In adopting verbal and nonverbal data, the current research proves its value in application and constitutes a precious bridge between the studies of verbal communication and nonverbal one.This dissertation is a new attempt to study communication, in which the writer revisits behaviorism as beneficial to communication research, redefines the nature of communication and constructs a dynamic response approach to communication. The study is significant both in theory and in practice: it can deepen the understanding of human communication, help improve people's communicative competence and benefit teachers in an inspiring way.