Communication Skills

Anh Pham

Marian Lyles

CMST&101

27 November 2013

Meeting #1

In our group, the aspect that I am researching is Listening and how it could help us in our life. The topic of the first meeting was about Intro to Human Communication and we also discussed other topics that related to our personal experiences. We have four people in our group which are Jonathan, Patrick, Erin, and me. This first meeting was set up at the library on from 9:15 to 9:50 on Wednesday, October 30th 2013. The four theories or terms that I am going to use in this paper are Listening Helps Us Develop and Maintain Relationships, Ask Questions and Paraphrase, Imitation Listening and Take Skillful Notes.

Listening helps us develop and maintain relationships among group members. Since this is our first meeting so we don’t really know anything about each other and kind of awkward at first. At the very beginning, we greeted with each other with a smile and “How are you?” However, after the greeting we became silent. Each of us have their own things to do such as texting, looking at our hands or looking at the reading without saying anything to each other. To reduced the awkwardness among group members, member A constantly asking questions about us, such as “Do you guys have any plans for Halloween?” or “Where do you guys lived?” to gain more information about each group member. After listening to other group members answered to those question, it helped us to keep our conversation going, reduced the awkwardness, and also increased our interaction for the next meeting.

Asking questions and paraphrase will help us to avoid misunderstanding among group members. Furthermore, in our group had two members that are foreign student, so sometimes we had difficulties to listen to each other. Because of that, it was very easy to create misunderstanding since we couldn’t hear what the other group member said. To be able to paraphrase and ask question, we had to...