Grammar Mistakes made during Oral Communications

One of the most common problems during the oral communication is that people dont know grammar rules and how to use them properly. There are people who know a lot of words, but when they want to make a sentence they aren’t able to do it because they lack knowledge of grammar. There are also a few more problems that affect normal communication that will be mentioned in this paper.

This study will deal with problem of people making so many mistakes during oral communication, and with possible resolution of that problem.

Key words: oral communication, grammar, mistakes

INTRODUCTION

Good communication is very important. It is important in terms of the individual’s success personally, in their personal relationships, and it is important for their professional succes. In most cases employers are looking for employees who posses good communication skills, and by that, they want them to be able to read and write effectively, to be able to orally communicate with others effectively, to participate in teams. Effective communication skills are one of the major predictors of upward mobility in the organization, that is, people who have good communication skills are more likely to get promoted, to get raises, to end up getting positions that they want. People with good communication skills are not only more effective in informing others and persuading others, they’re also more effective at getting support from others and acquiring information from others, they’re acquiring emotional support from others and getting others to believe in them and what they’re doing. These skills are extremely important in any aspect of professional life.

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In the personal sector, good communication skills matter so much in terms of the quality of family relationships, the relationship with close partners. Good communication is part of being a good parent, communicating effectively with your child, with your neighbors, and with others in your community.

COMMUNICATION

Proper definition of communication could be that it is the activity of conveying information through the exchange of thoughts, messages, or information, as by speech, visuals, signals,writing, or behaviour. Oral communication is purposeful presentation designed to increace knowledge, to foster understanding, or to promote change in the liseners’ attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviours.

Communication requires a sender, a message, and a receiver, although the receiver doesn’t need to be present or aware of the sender’s intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast distances in time and space. Communication requires that the communicating parties share an area of communicative commonality. The communication process is complete once the receiver has understood the message of the sender. Good communication can be considered as creative activity which takes different forms depending from many factors, including the characteristics of the communicator (perception of self, attitude towards language learning, the level of self expectation in language use, perception of others), the process of making the meaning and responding(linguistic components the purpose of interaction) and the context in which the interaction happens. Scientist Lynn Harter said about communication: „Communication is an integral part of a liberal studies education because what communication helps students to focus on how they use symbolic resources at hand to create and maintain relationships, to participate as a citizen in the public sphere, whether that’s attending a city council meeting and exercising their voice about a local initiative or petition. Or maybe it’s being involved on a board of directors for a local non-profit organization and being the person who’s responsible for communicating with various stakeholders of that organization.”

Types of oral communication are:

• Intrapersonal communication: This kind of communication refers to a conversation that people hold with themself in some situations-for example, when a person needs to make an important decision. This kind of communication can be considered as the process of thinking.
• Interpersonal communication: This kind of communication occurs between several people. Interpersonal communication can occur face to face and also through electronic channels like video-conferencing, chat rooms, e-mail,twitter.
• Small group communication: This type of communication occurs in a small group of people. Small group communication helps people to interact with others. On this way peopleteach to exchange ideas,solve problems and share experiences with each other.
• Public communication or public speaking: This typeof communication occurs between a speaker and an audience. Public speaking serves for the speaker to give important informations to audience. It is impotant to have effective public speaking so that the speaker can influence his audience when he communicates with them.
• Mass communication: This type of oral communication is sent out from a source to many receivers all aroun the world. It occurs through media, through internet and blogs.
• Corporate communication: This type of communication occurs between members of an organisation, within that organisation. Good corporate communication has a positive impact on morale, commitment and productivity in corporations.
• Intercultural communication: Intercultural communication can be defined as communication between people of different cultures and ethnicity. The world is increasingly becoming a global village and every country has people of various ethnicities. Thus, it is important to note differences in the communication practices of different cultures if intercultural harmony and understanding is to be maintained.

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

To the success of any organization despite its size, geographical location, good business communication is extremely important. Business communication is linked with the internal culture and external image of any organization. This type of communication determines what is communicated, by whom and at what level. Effective communication can help the organization in achieving its goal by informing, persuading and building good will within both the internal environment and the external environment. Communication, internal and external, takes place in a nonverbal and verbal manner: through gestures, expressions, meetings and through listening,speaking and writing.

Global environment is quickly changing and if organizations want to survive and prosper they need to change constanttly their way communication process are formed and delivered.

Good communication skills can be helpful to peoplein their careers in various ways: It can build selfconfidence, make useful contracts, enable you to help and lead others. Most successful people recognize that communication was vital to their job success.Most of them said that communication skills were more important than the major subject they had studied in college.

By improving communication one can help not only himself but the entire organization. That is because as an employee one forms a link in the organization’s information chain. People’s ability to receive, evaluate, use and pass on information gathered from inside and outside the organization affects your company’s effectiveness. Managers rely on such information from their employees to take suitable and necessary action.

By keeping employees informed about the happenings , by involving them in decision-making, and getting feedback from them regarding their opinions, attitudes and suggestions, managers can raise employee morale. As a result, employees are more willing to assume responsibility and support management’s efforts. Communication scholar said: There are three things that I believe are very important to communicating in organizations. The first thing I would say is be aware of the context. If you don’t understand the context, you don’t know what something means. So what does it mean, for example, if a CEO is earning a thousand times more money than the lowest paid employee in an organization? Well, to an outside watchdog group, that could be corporate greed. To financial analysts on Wall Street, that could be good management. So you have to understand the context if you’re going to understand the meaning of communication.

The second thing I would suggest that people think about in terms of communicating in organizations is that communication creates relationships. A lot of people think all communication is about getting your point across, making sure that you’re clear in your communication. I take a bit of a different view. Communication creates the relationships that you have with people. There’s that old saying, “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me.” It is a terrible, terrible axiom because the words we do use can harm people because they create different relationships. So how you talk does matter.

The third thing I would simply say is that people need to be curious about communication. I think one of the biggest problems people run into in organizations when they communicate is they think they know what the other person means. Many times we act on false assumptions. You need to get curious about what people are saying and ask questions like, “well, what do you mean by that?” and “where do you think this is going to take us?” and just a number of different questions to sort out what it is that people are meaning because we come from different kinds of experiences, different backgrounds and we need to really understand what a person means by the words that they use.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ORAL AND WRITTEN COMMUNICATION

Communication requires the transfer of informations from one person to another, and this kind of transfer of informations is dynamic. Writing is a static process of transfer of informations.

The written language can be more precise. The choice of written words can be done with greater deliberation and thought. Writer can rewrite his text .The reader can read the text as he wishes. He can do it quickly, slowly or the reader can stop thinking in order to think about the informations that he has just read. The reader also has a possibility of re-reading the text.

Speeches should be precise. There needs to be a lot of preparations and compresion for oral communication to be precise. When a word is once spoken it can’t be retracted. The speaker can only apoligize for a mistake. One can read from a written text and can achieve with it the same degree of verbal precision as written communication. In most cases audience finds speech-reading uninteresting and boring. Oral communication is considered to be effective in expressing meaning to an audience. During the speech a few signals are available to a speaker: gestures, intonation,ninflection, volume, pitch, pauses, movement, visual cues as appearence…

The speaker has more control over the informations that the listener will hear than the writer has over what the reader will read.

Reading an audience is a systematic and cumulative endeavor unavailable to the writer. As one speaks, the audience provides its own visual cues about whether it is finding the argument coherent, comprehensible, or interesting. Speakers should avoid focusing on single individuals within an audience.

COMMUNICATION COMPETENCE

The notion of communicative competence was introduced by dell Hymes in the late 1960s. Children grow up in the midst of verbal interactions in which they need to pay attention not only to grammatical form (the order of words and their inflection) but also to the implications, for themselves and other participants, of what is said. To the extent to which linguistic research is concerned with the association between forms and meanings, it should recognize that any linguistic expression is associated with and often reproduces a set of attitudes, values, and beliefs about the world. To be a fluent speaker means to be able to recognize and exploit such attitudes, values and beliefs. Furthermore, language is often only one of the codes used for communication. Speakers complement, refine, and sometimes neutralize or even contradict the meaning of words they use by relying on gestures and eye gaze, and by the use of tools and other material resources around them. The notion of communicative competence was also meant to encourage the study of different codes and modes of communicating within and across situations. Although the term competence echoes Chomsky’s use of the same word, the addition of the adjective communicative broadens the object of inquiry. Furthermore, while Chomsky’s notion of competence refers to an abstract set of (typically unconscious) rules-based on an innate language faculty and independent of actual usage-Hymes’ notion of competence refers to the knowledge necessary for adequately communicating in real life situations. Hence the attention to what speakers actually do with language that is implicit in the notion of communicative competence is not only a methodological but also a theoretical concern. That is, it not only allows us to start from what people do with language in order to infer what they need to know, but alsorecognizes that knowledge of language is gained from participation in actual communicative events, implying the simultaneous reliance on a number of semiotic resources and the collaboration of other participants. In this sense, Hymes’ notion of competence is not separate from the notion of performance the use of language as it is in Chompsky’s model.

The introduction of the notion of communicative competence was consistent with Hymes’ earlier call for a new interdisciplinary field, the etnography of communication (sometimes called the etnography of speaking). This field is dedicated to the empirical study of patterns of speaking in different communities around the world. Theoretically, it draw from a number of traditions, most notably Roman Jakobson’S functionalism as represented in his speech event model, from which Hymes derived his notion of communicative event, which is a unit of analysis conceived for the study of communicative competence. In This framework, speaker competence is no longer defined exclusively in terms of their knowledge of grammatical rules, but is also defined in terms of the range of communicative events in which they can participate. Such a range defines person’s repertoire within a given community.

MOST USUAL MISTAKES IN ORAL COMMUNICATION

Commuincators in the process of communication are influenced by several inputs and a deficiency in the quality of any of these inputs can prevent successful communication. According to Adler and Rodman(2006), communicators’ personal and social background, perception of self and others and verbal and non-verbal language skills are the main inputs influencing the process of communication. Communicators’ personal background factors such as age, motivation, literacy, and social class make the language learning experience of all individuals unique. 

There are a few factors which can affect oral communication:

• Language difficulties
• The use of jargon
• Accent
• Physical condition affecting speach or hearing
• Environmental condition
• Grammar problems

If the persons don’t speak the same language fluently, normal conversation is hard to expect. Evidently they will have troubles in understanding each other. Here are a few english words whic are most commonly misspronounced:

• Archipelago
• Arctic
• Accessory
• Athlete
• Candidate
• Chaos
• Clothes
• Dilate
• Height
• Heinous
• Hierarchy
• Illinois
• Interpret
• Miniature mischievous
• Orient
• Old-fashioned
• Picture precipitation
• Drowned
• Preventive
• Pronunciation
• Prostate
• Jewelry
• Library
• Medievel

Accent is also one of the factors that can strongly affect the communication between people.

If two persons have different accents their communication may not be succesful. Their differences in speach may create misunderstandings.

Physical condition affecting speach or hearing is one of the important factors that can influence normal communicaton. If persons who are communicating have a speech or hearing impairment the way that they communicate may have to be adapted.

One of the factors by which oral communication is affected is enviromental condition.

If persons are communicating in noisy conditions there might be the possibility that one of them miss the important information. In this conditions normal communication is very hard to achieve.

Jargon is one of the factors that can affect communication. Especially in working situations people use words and phrases that mean something to them and their colleagues in their workplace or industry but which could be a foreign language to others.

Grammar problem is important factor which affects communication. If people lack knowledge of grammar it is hard for them to create sentence, and it is hard to have normal communication in this conditions. There are few most common mistakes that people usually make. Here are the examples of a few gramaticaly incorrect sentences:

• The man which works here is from Brazil.
• Ana is married with a doctor.
• John must to call Isabel immadiately.
• Although it was snowing,but we had a good time.
• I like very much chocolate.
• He can to walk.
• Where I can find this person? (Where can I find this person?)
• I have been here since five months.
• The room is not enough big. (The room is not big enough.)
• There is nine boys in the bus.
• We didn’t see nobody.
• He leaves in 6:00 am.
• Do you like a cup of coffee?
• Nick should not to drink alcohol

IMPROVEMENT OF ORALCOMMUNICATION

No matter how good one knows the language, during the oral communication people make mistakes. These mistakes happen from different reasons. Even though oral communication is an effective way of receiving your message across to your listeners, it can also create misunderstanding, misinterpretation and confusion. This happens because each person has his own way of interpreting even when you speak the same language as your listener.

There are a few ways to avoid this problems and to improve oral communication.

One of the ways to improve oral communication is reading (books and other scriptures). If the person wants to avoid the problem of misunderstanding then it would be good to use simple words that can be clearly understood.

Also in order to improve oral skills it is recomandable for a person to be a good listener, because effective communication includes speaking and active listening. If a person listens carefully , what the speaker is talking about, he improves his understanding.

If a person wants his listeneres to understand the message it is good to tell a story, joke or read a quote. Jokes usually help people to relax, and in that way their mind will be more open to listen to a speaker. The way in which the story is told can affect the thinking of the listeners.

Asking the right questions is also helpful in order to improve communication.

A "Why” questions gives a person a lot of reasons, excuses, understanding and explanations. "How” questions set someones’ brain thinking for a solution, useful information and a strategy.

By asking questions one can create a positive debate and interaction that will benefit all involved.

If a speaker wants his speech to be good he should think and prepare before he speaks.

Misunderstanding can occur if a speaker exppresses himself without thinking and allows his emotions to take over. It is good for a speaker to create thoughts in his mind first and then to tell them aloud.

Communication can be considered effective if a speaker reduces the use of verbal pauses.

If a speaker often stops his sentence and adds "ah”, "um”, "well” it can be very irritating to his listeners. To solve this problemm it’s good for a speaker to record his own voice and in that way he will be aware of all the mistakes he does during the speech. In this we way the speaker can improve his style of speaking.

To have an effective commnication speaker should use words and phrases with care. Speaker shouldn’t allow himself that people assume what he is trying to say.

Speaker should speak with specifity, and words like never, ever, all, or always need to be avoided.

One of the characteristics that speaker should posses is honesty, because if the speaker is promising something to people that is not possible it will break down any trust that the speaker has developed.

It is also recomandable for a speaker to relax while speaking. It is important that one doesn’t speak in hurry, because that could create impresion that the speaker is confused. Eye contact is also important. If the speaker is facing a crowd he shouldn’t look at one person for more than 5 seconds.

CONCLUSION

From this paper we could learn the most common mistakes people do during oral communication.

Most people think that communication is about transferring informations clearly. Regardless of the context, of who you’re talking to and of the situation, you need to be clear in your communication. I think that’s a misperception because there are times at which being ambiguous can be very effective in your communication. I think one of the reasons that this is a misperception-that we need to be clear-is that our dominant way of thinking about communication is that it’s about getting your point across, or what some people call transferring information.

I think we need to think about communication differently and change the perception of what communication is, that communication is about creating relationships, whether that’s creating romantic relationships, whether that’s creating relationships in a team, in the workplace, say between an employee and his or her boss, or whether that’s creating relationships among nations or countries. It is good to think about communication as a process of creating relationship. So how we communicate creates different things. I think one of the biggest misperceptions is thinking that clear communication is good communication. And I think the reason we think that is because we have a model of communication that says that communication is about transferring information. I think that misperception goes away if we change our perception to one in which communication creates relationships.