COMMUNICATION SKILLS: A REVIEW OF THE COURSE,
COURSE HRD 2101
First Lecture given at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and
Technology
I want to take this first lecture to introduce to you this Course so that you
get to appreciate (a) what you are supposed to cover; (b) how you will
benefit from studying it; and (c) the importance attached to this Course in
tertiary or post-secondary school institutions of learning including technical
and professional institutes and, indeed universities. The word tertiary
means third in order; it is thus used to refer to the third educational level,
i.e. the level after primary and secondary.
There is a fourth thing that I would want you to be clearly aware of: that is
the fact that your Course covers only a tiny area of the very broad and vast
subject called Communication. This will become very clear from our
subsequent Introduction to Communication as a reality and experience of
human life and as a subject of scholarly study.
After a review of the subject, I will suggest what you yourselves can do to
personally improve your communication skills. The beauty of this subject,
Communication, is that it is concerned with what we do everyday.
Communication is at the heart of living. Mothers coddle (that is treat with
tenderness) their babies, talk to them and receive a responding smile or
giggle; the babies thereby develop into communicating adults. Families talk
among themselves, solve practical daily problems by communicating;
brothers and sisters share their hearts’ troubles and concerns. Children, who
are almost like blank slates, go to school and knowledge and skills are
imparted to them through the process of communication. Great scientists
are not born with a knowledge of the Law of Gravity or the Theory of Special
Relativity or of Mendeleev’s Periodic Table of the Elements. They acquire this
knowledge from reading. In this way, the genius of the scientific tradition is
communicated to them.
At the end of this course, through which you will be led by three lectures,
including Yours Truly, you will have absolutely no doubts about the
relevance of this Course whatever your specialty is. And I confidently
promise you: You will find this one of the most enjoyable courses in your
academic career. What is more, this Course will help you pry open the
treasures of knowledge in your preferred scientific or technological course.
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Now look at the Course Outline which I have already circulated.
At first sight, it looks fairly simple and brief. But as I will shortly
demonstrate, the person who drew this course outline sketched things in
broad brush strokes. This course is large and provides parameters for
covering it either superficially or with moderate depth. One cannot hope to
cover it ‘wholly’. No area of human knowledge can be covered wholly. This
course outline is pregnant with challenge to the curious student to carry
further research into areas which interest her or him.
The Course has 8 major areas requiring to be covered in the 12 weeks of the
First Semester. These areas are:
1.
A GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO COMMUNICATION:
Should include a brief survey of communication in history, identifying
different types of human communication, a definition of communication and
problems in communication. Should it also include an attempt to answer the
question: Why communicate in the foreign English language? How far should
one go in history: to the emergence of pre-human ape-like hominids 2
million years ago or to the emergence of primitive Man of our species, Homo
sapiens sapiens?
I am raising these questions to hint at the vastness of the subject, at the
many directions to which the curious mind may be tempted to travel.
In the wisdom of the course designers, this Course was made an essentially
Skills-oriented one. It has a practical objective: to enable the student to
communicate better and to learn better—and probably to enhance his or her
career prospects. However, never forget for a single moment that you are
University students and university education is the pursuit not only of skills
but also of knowledge and excellence. A university student, unlike probably
a professional secretarial student, will want to understand what this
phenomenon of communication is mostly about and to understand the
theories that academicians and scholars have come up with in regard to
communication.
2.
ORAL COMMUNICATION
This topic is the second major segment of the Course. It has been included
in recognition of the importance of spoken communication in daily life—in
informal person-to-person interaction, and in formal learning situations or
social interactions. At JKUAT, the emphasis is on skills in oral communication
for the purposes of learning and preparing for a career—for example in
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business, in management and administration—where spoken communication
will be required.
From a purely knowledge oriented point of view, the student will be aware
that the greater phase of human history was an oral phase. If our species
Homo sapiens sapiens emerged 50,000 years ago, writing was invented in
Egypt, in Africa, that is, and in Sumeria, Mesopotamia, present day Iraq,
roughly only 5,000 years ago! Our Kenyan societies were oral until virtually
the last century, that is the 20th century.
3.
LISTENING SKILLS
This segment is, in reality, an extension of skills in oral communication. A
person utters words—another listens, and if the second person responds
appropriately, communication has been achieved. Effective speaking and
effective listening are complementary.
4.
WRITING SKILLS
I have suggested that we Kenyans like many of our brothers and sisters in
sub-Saharan Africa have only in very recent history entered the literate,
writing culture. The invention of writing by the Egyptians and Sumerians
revolutionised human culture and methods of learning. Writing enabled
Man—that is Man including Woman—to preserve knowledge and to pass
information in precise form from one generation to the next.
Writing and reading have been an essential element in learning and
education through the ages—from around 2000B.C. when the Old
Babylonian King Hammurabi was inscribing Laws on indestructible clay
tablets, through the writing of the Hebrew Mosaic Law around 900B.C, which
was to become the core of the Old Testament of the Bible, through the
writing of Greek philosophy in the five or so centuries before the birth of
Christ.
Writing and reading, I will be bold to suggest, are at the core of the learning
of Science and Technology at JKUAT. You will be called upon to do
Continuous Assessment Tests (CATs) in written English. You will be called
upon to submit written project reports. What can be of greater relevance
than this topic? But how broad it really can be! Will you only learn to do your
term papers better? Or will you end up writing books for popular study to
educate our people to make Kenyan (African) agriculture productive enough
to adequately feed our entire population? So that the images of emaciated
starving people are no longer the normal fare on our Television?
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5.
READING SKILLS
Just as Speaking and Listening skills are complementary, so are writing and
reading skills. Reading has over the ages been Man’s window to the world of
human knowledge. And as we have already said it is at the core of your
study at JKUAT. You should aim at developing skills which make reading not
a burdensome necessity but an enjoyable activity. Some of us are quite
advanced in years—but we still find it enjoyable and rewarding to read all
kinds of books and materials—fiction, history, even books on science and
technology rendered into laymen’s language.
6.
VISUAL COMMUNICATION
A Canadian educationist Marshall McLuhan divided human society into four
historical phases: primitive (during which oral communication was
dominant); scribal (during which people would write by hand and copy
books by hand); print-dominated; and nuclear. We shall talk about this
later in great elaboration. The nuclear phase has given us advanced
communication technology including telephone communication, radio and
Television and—most recently—computer-assisted Internet communication.
The visual communication segment of our course is partly focused at the
communication methods of the modern world. This should have especial
interest, probably fascination, for science and technology students.
7.
PUBLIC COMMUNICATION
This, I think, is a career-oriented course segment. Whether you will join
industry in a management or technical capacity, you will play a leading role
which will require you to communicate to groups of persons.
We are living in the era of the mass media—radio, television, mass
circulating newspapers. You have no choice: you are a part of this public
communication culture either as a consumer or as its agent.
8.
SOURCES OF INFORMATION
The modern world is blessed—and cursed—with vast sources of information:
millions of books, thousands of journals and newspapers and magazines,
tens of Television and Radio channels—and of course the ubiquitous Internet
with access to the World Wide Web.
This, of course, is not to say that here in Kenya we have all the books we
would want and many modern books on science and technology are priced
beyond our reach. You may not even be able to access all the learning aids
you would want to in the University library.
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The segment on Sources of Information is meant to provide skills in
accessing needed information from multiple sources. This accessing of
information is essential for your learning—in whatever area of study or
discipline.
That is the Course outline.
WHO STUDIES COMMUNICATION SKILLS?
You need to know that this subject is a compulsory subject for all the
courses:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Geomatic Engineering & Geospatial I.S
Food Science
Landscape Architecture
Construction Management
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Telecommunication and Information Engineering
Electrical and Electronics Engineering
Biomechanical and Environmental Engineering
Horticulture.
You may also be interested to know that Communication skills is a subject
taught in professional courses offered by professional institutes or
Associations. In Kenya, students doing courses offered by the Association of
Business Executives (ABE) study the subject. It is one of the subjects
studied under the Institute for Management of Information Studies (IMIS); it
is a Chartered Public Secretaries course; and public administrators are
supposed to study it. And of course it is offered at the Institute of Mass
Communications. And University courses in Journalism are intensified
courses in Communication skills.
Giving a place to Communication Ssills is not restricted to Kenyan
institutions of learning. Visit Web Sites of American universities or British
universities, to give two examples, and you will notice that Communication
Studies occupies a prominent place in university education.
Need I give examples?
At the University of Southern Indiana in the US there are two
Communication-oriented
courses,
namely
Communications
and
Communication Studies. Under Communications, course COMM 192 is an
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Introduction to Mass Communications, while course COMM 494 is on Mass
Communication Law and Ethics.
Under Communication Studies are provided courses very similar to the
JKUAT Communication Skills. Course SPCH 101 is an Introduction to
Public Speaking. And course SPCH 107 is an Introduction to
Interpersonal Communication.
For those students interested in obtaining information about similar courses
offered in Kenyan institutions or elsewhere, I could give extra hints in the
course of our study. I do also encourage them to visit Websites on the
Internet.
But there is a point which has not escaped my notice: the Indiana University
Courses while being Degree courses are referred to as ‘Introductory’. I
admire that modesty! Since all subjects are so vast, let us modestly think of
being ‘introduced’ to them. For the curious mind so much may be explored
but far much more will be left unexplored.
HINTS ABOUT HOW TO APPROACH THE COMMUNICATIONS
SKILLS COURSE
Finally, because I do not want to overload this first lecture, let me give you a
few hints at the very outset on how you may go about improving your
Communication Skills.
Let me start with an anecdote. I know of a young woman from a village in
Kikuyu Division who recently found it necessary to acquire a job as a
mathematics teacher in a primary school in England—no doubt attracted by
the income earning prospects (with the British Sterling Pound exchanging at
more than Kenya Shillings 140.00—in the 1960s it used to exchange at less
than Shillings 20.00!). She would listen to tape recordings of British speech
(probably from BBC broadcasts?) and also tape her own speech. The short of
it is that she managed to overcome her Gikuyu accent, got the teaching job,
and what is more managed to keep it.
Do not get me wrong: I am not saying one should learn to speak like the
English people or Americans or any foreigners for that matter—and there is
much virtue in English being spoken in a variety of ways, including a Kenyan
or African way, because English has become the property not of the English
people, but of a world population. I only use the example of the young
woman to underline the possibility of your acquiring communication skills
suited to your life or career needs, using your own resources.
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Which are the resources for communication skills enhancement available to
you?
1.
READING
You should read well-written books in all kinds of areas and subjects. Even if
your pursuit is say, Geomatic Engineering or Food Science, there is
absolutely no reason why you should not read the novels of Ngugi wa
Thing’o or Chinua Achebe or the plays of Wole Soyinka or even classical and
modern British and American writers: Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy,
William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, etc. Books
translated from other European languages into English will also do you a lot
of good, e.g. the writings of French writers Emile Zola or Gustave Flaubert,
of the Russians Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Fydor Dostoyevsky and Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn.
I should, in this regard, draw your attention to a feature of, especially,
American college education where students are encouraged to combine the
study of purely science subjects and humanities subjects (arts, including
literature) and the social sciences.
Become well-read young men and women. Read history books by Bethwell
Ogot, Ali Mazrui and Robert July. If you obtain them, read the writings of
that foremost orator and communicator, Winston Churchill. Read the
memoirs of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the much suffering wife of former
President Bill Clinton—and also read the life of Bill Clinton himself.
Am I asking for too much? No! It is within your mental capacity. It is within
your genes. A human being can broaden his or her mental and intellectual
horizons as much as they choose.
2.
OWN WRITING
Make a practice of developing your notes, written in the course of listening
to lectures, into fully-written out grammatical texts, preserving the linking
arguments or illustrations. Make a practice of writing your original material,
whether on your area of study or on any other subject. Share out your
writings and criticize one another—of course in a courteous and friendly
spirit.
By no means feel inhibited from venturing into writing on subjects outside
your area of study. Remember that one of Africa’s foremost novelists—
Nigerian Chinua Achebe—studied medicine and literature at the University of
Ibadan, Nigeria. And the great Russian author who exposed the mass
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murders and brutalities of the Soviet communist regime was a trained …
mathematician.
3.
MAKE A HABIT OF COMMUNICATING FORMALLY
Make a habit of communicating formally—whether in Kiswahili or English—
and get away from the habit of communicating in Sheng! Or, may be there is
no Sheng in the University.
In concluding my first lecture, let me tell you a secret. You are now in your
very best year so far as the receptivity and creativity of the mind is
concerned. You are standing on the threshold of great discoveries and
penetrating frontiers of knowledge. Remember always: When Isaac Newton
made all those discoveries about the forces that operate in the universe,
including the force of gravity, he was only twenty-six years old! And when
the greatest scientist of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein, discovered
the Theory of Special Relativity, he was also in his mid-twenties.
Use these best years of your life creatively. You shall never regret it.
I will invite questions and comments.
In the next Lecture we shall get down to business and ask: What Is
Communication?
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