Of all God’s creations, including animals, in the communication process, language is uniquely a human attribute that no other animal, no matter how highly intelligent, can produce and utter speech sounds like a human being, language experts unanimously submit. Language separates man as human and enables him to weather the storm and deal with other emergencies in life. It is therefore of utmost importance to try to identify and develop our communication skills to earn people’s trust. Often, bitter wars are fought, tempers flare, at times leading to disastrous consequences and preventable deaths. Poor communication perverts development and polarises society.
We must therefore learn to communicate our opinions without hurting others by simply adopting the four basic skills identified by language purists and masters to enhance interpersonal communication, that is, communication between two people or groups of individuals. In our last attempt to highlight the four basic communication skills—listening, speaking, reading and writing—we devoted a large chunk of space to discussing listening skills as the foundation of all, without which the power to grasp other forms of skills would be in vain or incomplete. Listening, language experts observed, plays an important role in the use of language. According to one of the English purists, one must be a good listener to understand what others are saying. I want to add here that pride and selfish desires sometimes block our ears and we choose to do what we like, leading to conflicts and wars.
Think about the immediate and remote causes of wars around the globe. Speaking, too, enables the person speaking to pass on information effectively for the listener to hear and get the message correctly. Again, speaking is described by a language master as “the ability to produce utterances and adapt them to the circumstances of the discourse.” Another objective of speaking is to express oneself intelligently in a social and acceptable form, a language enthusiast emphasised. The use of grammar and phonology plays a key role here. Never take your grammar and pronunciation for granted. One must learn them to avoid vocalisation pitfalls capable of distorting the spoken word.
Reading and writing skills are concerned with written language. Reading, the inventors of vocabulary say, is the ability to make sense of print. It involves the experience of the reader to interpret the written or printed page. In other words, the reader must be properly grounded in the use of signs and symbols to fully understand the message. Reading involves other communication skills we would later learn about, as it is regarded as the most complex of the language skills.
