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Teacher Resource Bank
GCE Communication and Culture
Other Guidance:
• AS Key Terms
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Teacher Resource Bank / GCE Communication and Culture / Other Guidance: AS Key Terms / Version 1.0
AS KEY TERMS
Preamble:
The following constitutes a glossary of ‘Essential’ and ‘Useful’ terms to be used with
the Communication and Culture specification. In other words it should be read as an
addendum to the description of AS content. It is intended to provide clarification and
encouragement to teachers and students alike while at the same time confirming the
flexibility that consciously exists within the content of the AS course. It is likely that
the ‘Useful’ list will be added to on a year by year basis.
Please note that this glossary relates to the AS specification. Further clarification of
the technical vocabulary for A2 will appear on this site in 2009.
In very simple terms the ‘Essential’ terms are those you can expect to appear in
examination questions without the need to be explained to candidates. The ‘Useful’
are other subject specific terms which help to define the scope of the specification
but would not be used without clarification (unless, like ‘hairstyle’, there is no
particular technical or specialist meaning that is distinct from the normal usage of the
term).
There are four lists which address the explicit content areas for AS, ranging from
‘Key Concept’ to ‘Toolkits’:
a. Key Concepts: Essential
Codes: meaning systems consisting of signs. Signs are anything that has the
potential to generate meaning, to signify. When a sign has generated meaning, it is
said to have achieved signification. This is fundamental to the semiotic approach to
the study of communication.
Communication: a process through which meanings are exchanged.
Context: the situation within which communication takes place.
Culture: a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values.
Identity: the sense we have of ourselves, which we then ‘represent’ ‘elsewhere’: a
person’s social meaning.
Power: control and influence over other people and their actions.
Representation: refers to the construction in any medium (especially the mass
media) of aspects of ‘reality’ such as people, places, objects, events, cultural
identities and other abstract concepts. Such representations may be in speech or
writing as well as still or moving pictures. (Daniel Chandler’s definition).
Value: the worth, importance, or usefulness of something to somebody.
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Teacher Resource Bank / GCE Communication and Culture / Other Guidance: AS Key Terms / Version 1.0
b (i) The Nature of Culture: Essential
Bias: a way of privileging one argument or interest over another based on personal
feeling rather than rational argument.
Cultural Practice: the things people do in everyday life – such as greeting ach other.
Cultural Product: the things that we encounter in our daily lives.
Elite Culture: the culture of those with power and influence.
High Culture: according to Arnold “the best that has been thought and said”: Art,
Literature and Music.
Popular (Low) Culture: the products and practices of everyday life as practised and
valued by ordinary people.
Youth Culture: the cultural products and practices of the young.
Ethnicity: a term which represents social groups with a shared history, sense of
identity, geography and cultural roots which may occur despite racial difference.
Ethnic character, background, or affiliation.
Gender: refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes
that a given society considers appropriate for men and women.
Meanings and Practices of Everyday Life (MPEL): the codes and conventions
that govern the way we live our lives.
Prejudice: a pre-formed opinion, usually an unfavourable one, based on insufficient
knowledge, irrational feelings, or inaccurate stereotypes.
Register: is used to describe variations in the use of language or other
communication codes associated with a particular context such as a job, an area of
technical expertise or social setting. As a student, part of the task is to learn the
register of your subject so that you are able to write and speak as, say, a historian or
a geographer or a biologist.
Ritual: the system of set procedures and actions of a group.
Social class: any category based on power, wealth or income.
Socialisation: all of the processes through which we are inducted into society.
Status: the relative position or standing of somebody or something in a society or
other group.
Stereotype: a mould into which reality is poured, whatever its individual shape. A
stereotype is a simplified and generalised image of a group of people, which is
created out of the values, judgements and assumptions of its creators, in most cases
society itself. A stereotype of men might suggest their machismo or manliness.
Style: a distinctive and identifiable form in an artistic medium such as music,
architecture, or literature: a way of doing something, especially a way regarded as
expressing a particular attitude or typifying a particular period.
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Teacher Resource Bank / GCE Communication and Culture / Other Guidance: AS Key Terms / Version 1.0
Taboo: forbidden to be used, mentioned, or approached because of social or cultural
rather than legal prohibitions.
b (ii) The Nature of Culture: Useful
Aesthetics (taste): is commonly known as the study of judgments of sentiment and
taste. More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical reflection on
art, culture and nature." Aesthetics studies new ways of seeing and of perceiving the
world and seeks to determine what is artistically valid or beautiful.
Cultural capital: the idea that knowledge of certain topics can confer similar benefits
to monetary wealth. People who possess lots of money and wealth have economic
capital. Those who are able to converse knowledgeably about (say) philosophy,
music, art or literature have cultural capital. We could also extend the concept to the
realm of expert knowledge in sub-cultural groups: sub-cultural capital.
Cultural transmission: the various ways in which culture is disseminated and
discussed.
Divergence: moving personal communication style away from that of another
person. Could be used to signal status difference or the desire to avoid intimacy.
Emblems: gestures with the specific cultural meanings attached, often used as direct
substitutes for words.
Folk Culture: the localized lifestyle of a culture. It is usually handed down through
oral tradition, relates to a sense of community, and demonstrates the "old ways" over
novelty. Folk culture is quite often imbued with a sense of place. If its elements are
copied by, or removed to, a foreign locale, they will still carry strong connotations of
their original place of creation.
Mass Culture: literally culture made by and for the masses.
Enculturation: the ongoing process whereby we acquire ‘culture’.
Hegemony: the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci explained why the majority of people
in a culture do not adopt the values and beliefs of their own class. He argued that the
dominant minority within cultures present the values and beliefs of their own class as
somehow ‘natural’ and thus universal. In this way people end up promoting the
values and beliefs of the dominant or ruling class rather than of their own class.
Mediation: the process by which a media text represents an idea, issue or event to
us.
Negotiation: this concept is at the very heart of the semiotic approach to the study of
communication, implying as it does that texts do not have meaning except through
the process of negotiation between text and reader.
Naturalisation: process by which you become the citizen of another country.
Norm: a rule or convention which is characteristic of particular culture or sub-culture.
Preferred reading: the reading a text’s producer would like receivers to make. The
producer will compose the text in a way which ensures this occurs.
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Teacher Resource Bank / GCE Communication and Culture / Other Guidance: AS Key Terms / Version 1.0
Subjectivity: the individual’s sense of self and identity.
c (i) Cultural Codes: Essential
Accent: a way of pronouncing words that indicates the place of origin or social
background of the speaker.
Appearance: the way somebody or something looks or seems to other people: an
outward aspect of somebody or something that creates a particular impression.
Bodily Adornment: all the ways in which ‘furnish’ and decorate the body (clothing,
jewellery, make-up, tattooing etc).
Dialect: a type of language use specific to a particular area within a country.
Facial Expression: the use of the face as an expressive instrument of
communication.
Feedback: the response received by the sender to a message.
Gesture: a movement made with a part of the body in order to express meaning or
emotion or to communicate an instruction.
Group: a collection of individuals.
Group cohesion: the tendency of a group to remain intact.
Groupthink: a feature of groups whereby individual performance is inhibited by the
priorities of the group as a whole.
Ideal self: the kind of person we would like to be.
Idiolect (idiosyncratic dialect): An individual’s personal language register, it
encompasses all our experiences and knowledge of language. The idiolect consists
not only of vocabulary but also of the conventions of performance: all our words in all
the forms, contexts and with all the differing emphasis we have given to them.
Interaction: communication between or joint activity involving two or more people.
Kinesics: body movement such as gesture, facial expression, posture, head
nodding, orientation (where you put your self in relation to others): the study of the
way meanings are communicated by bodily movement.
Language: an abstract system of communication using words and sentences to
convey meaning.
Non-verbal communication: all communication other than that involving
words and language.
Non-verbal leakage: when messages ‘slip out’ in spite of our attempts to
control them.
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Teacher Resource Bank / GCE Communication and Culture / Other Guidance: AS Key Terms / Version 1.0
Paralanguage: consists of the non-verbal elements that accompany speech. It
includes the way we speak (also known as prosodic features); volume; pitch;
intonation; speed of delivery; articulation; rhythm; the sounds we make other than
language; laughter; crying; lip smacking; yawning; sighing; screeching; coughing;
filled pauses such as ‘Mmmm’, ‘Ahhh’, Errr’, Ummm; unfilled pauses.
Persona: an adopted form of the self/identity.
Perception: the process of making sense of sensory data.
Personal Style: the specific features of our individual communication.
Posture: the way we sit, stand and hold our bodies.
Proxemics: the study of how we use space and distance including seating
arrangements, queuing and territoriality.
Proximity: the ways in which the space around us creates meanings for ourselves
and others.
Role: a part we play.
Role model: a person whose behaviour, persona and/or appearance provide an
influential model for others to follow.
School of thought: a set of beliefs or ideas held by a group of academics; a shared
way of thinking about a particular issue.
Self-concept: is the idea we have of ourselves as individuals.
Self disclosure: the act of revealing ourselves, consciously or otherwise.
Self esteem: a measure of our own self worth.
Self-fulfilling prophecy: refers to how our belief that something is true can cause it
to be so. For example, if we believe we are confident, we act as if we are confident,
and so become confident.
Self image: the view we have of ourselves.
Self presentation: the conscious process through which self becomes text.
Verbal communication: communicating with words and language (as opposed to
images, actions or behaviour).
c (ii) Cultural Codes: Useful
Adapters: almost unconscious gestures used to relieve stress or boredom; for
example, drumming fingers on a desk or scratching the back of your head. Often,
adapters signal nervousness or anxiety in situations such as giving a talk or being
interviewed, so we do our best to control them.
Affective function: refers to the important role non-verbal communication has to
play in establishing and maintaining relationships.
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Teacher Resource Bank / GCE Communication and Culture / Other Guidance: AS Key Terms / Version 1.0
Assertiveness training: courses in assertiveness training seek to build
confidence through the development of communication skills, which include the
recognition and ability to resist manipulative non-verbal controls.
Bardic function: bards were the poets and minstrels of their day. They translated
the everyday cultural concerns of the Middle Ages into verse. In their book Reading
Television (1990), Fiske and Hartley argue that television plays a similar role today.
Television has its own specialised language and it helps to define reality for us,
reinforcing the dominant myths of our culture. The idea of the bardic function
stresses continuity; television is playing a role that has always been played.
Body language: bodily mannerisms, postures, and facial expressions that can be
interpreted as unconsciously communicating somebody's feelings or psychological
state.
Code switching: refers to the way in which we may change between languages or
dialects depending on who we are talking to.
Communicative Competence: the capacity to communicate; usually refers to the
ability to use various communicative codes, verbal and non-verbal, appropriately in a
variety of contexts.
Convergence: the way in which we adjust our language to make it more like the
language style of the person we are addressing if we want to convey warmth,
friendliness and empathy.
Divergence: moving language style away from the other person’s way of
speaking can signal status or the desire to avoid intimacy.
Emblems: gestures with the specific cultural meanings attached, often used as direct
substitutes for words.
Gaze: looking, eye-contact; a code of nvc.
Group dynamic: How the individuals in a group relate to one another and the group.
Hair/Hairstyle: a significant code of NVC.
Haptics: touching, physical contact such as holding, hitting, kissing, stroking, shaking
hands, guiding.
Illustrators: these gestures reinforce the words of a speaker; for example, by
pointing to something in a shop while saying ‘I’ll have one of those’.
Intergroup communication: communication between groups.
Interpersonal communication: communication between people at an individual
level.
Intragroup communication: communication within a group.
Looking glass-theory: the idea that we base views of ourself on how we think
others are perceiving us and judging us.
Mirror self: the tendency for us to see ourselves through a reflection of how others
see us.
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Teacher Resource Bank / GCE Communication and Culture / Other Guidance: AS Key Terms / Version 1.0
Occulesics: eye movement, length and direction of gaze, changes in pupil size.
Olfactics: smell, odour.
Orientation: the way we position ourselves physically in relation to others.
Phatic communication: aspects of language which serve to reinforce social
relationships rather than to communicate information (e.g. ‘Have a nice day’).
Pitch: the intonation of speech, the way in which our voices may rise and fall.
Performance: communicative behaviour.
Received Pronunciation (RP): deals solely with the sounds of words (accent) and
can be described as the prestigious speech of educated people. It is usually
associated with London and the south-east and with the middle and upper classes. It
is sometimes known as the Queen’s English, Oxford English or BBC English.
Reflexivity: describes what it is to be self-conscious, to be self-aware and to reflect
on who you are, what you’re doing and how you present yourself in the world. It is a
feature of much of contemporary communication that it is similarly conscious and
aware. It is self-reflexive. In this way, for example, we are used to seeing films about
the making of films, advertisements that play with the conventions of advertisements,
and comedies that refer to the ‘rules’ of comedy.
Skin: a significant code of NVC.
Smell: a significant code of NVC.
Sociolect: a social dialect.
Staging: the way in which we manipulate the contexts of interpersonal
communication (the physical locations, the props, the costume).
Style shifting: this refers to the way in which we may modify our use of the same
dialect within different situations. For example, we may use more formal language at
an interview than we would use at home.
Teams: those we communicate ‘alongside’.
Touch: a significant code of NVC.
Tone: the way somebody says something as an indicator of what that person is
feeling or thinking.
Timbre: the quality of a speech sound that comes from its tone rather than its pitch
or volume.
Transactional analysis: an approach to understanding and ultimately improving
interpersonal communication introduced by Eric Berne in his book Games People
Play (1968). The essence of Eric Berne’s theories of personality is that each of us at
any one time has the option of adopting one of three ego states: ‘the child’, ‘the
parent’ and ‘the adult’. These are not stages of maturity, they are options within all of
us; a 6-year-old can adopt a parent ego state in conversation with a 30-year-old in
‘child’ ego state.
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Teacher Resource Bank / GCE Communication and Culture / Other Guidance: AS Key Terms / Version 1.0
Uses and gratifications theory: this is an approach to understanding the role of
mass communication in society. The basic premise runs as follows. We all have
various needs and desires, such as needs for information, entertainment and social
interaction which media texts (such as television programmes, video games,
magazines and newspapers) help us to fulfil. Hence use the mass media to gratify
our needs.
d (i) Toolkits: Essential
Anchorage: directing receivers towards one particular meaning from a range of
possible meanings. A caption can anchor the meaning of a photograph.
Barrier: anything which interferes with the processes of communication.
Channel: a communication route or connection.
Connotation: the meanings in a text that are revealed through the receiver’s own
personal and cultural experience.
Convention: a rule of artistic practice.
Decode: to convert an encoded message into a form that can be understood.
Denotation: the specific, direct or obvious meaning of a sign rather than its
associated meanings: those things directly referenced by a sign.
Encode: to convert a message into a means capable of being transmitted.
Form and Content: these describe the essential relationship between the ‘shape’ of
a text (how it’s been made) and ‘what’s in it/what it’s about’.
Function: what a text, group of texts, or indeed communication itself, ‘does’ (inform,
persuade, entertain, socialise etc).
Gatekeeper: someone who controls the selection of information to be offered to a
given channel. Thus, for example, newspaper editors are significant gatekeepers, but
we are all gatekeepers in an interpersonal sense, deciding as we do what we
communicate and what we omit or hold back.
Genre: this term describes the subdivisions of the output of a given medium (e.g.
television, film, magazine publishing). A genre is a type, a particular version of a
communication medium. For example, soap opera is a television genre, for it
represents a particular approach to theme, style and form.
Icon: a sign that works by its similarity to the thing it represents.
Index: a type of sign (in C.S. Peirce’s categorisation) that has a direct or causal
relationship with its signified. The sign points (like an index finger) to its signified.
Smoke is an index of fire.
Medium (and media): the method(s) we use to communicate.
Message: the meaning carried by an act of communication or text.
Model: a graphic or verbal representation of communication processes or aspects of
them: a diagrammatic representation of a communication issue.
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Teacher Resource Bank / GCE Communication and Culture / Other Guidance: AS Key Terms / Version 1.0
Noise source: the origin of any barrier to communication.
Open and closed texts: Eco talked about two tendencies of texts: the tendency to
be ‘open’ and allow/invite/encourage a wide range of different interpretations: the
opposite tendency presents ‘closed’ text which can only be read in a limited number
of ways, sometimes only one way.
Process School: a school of thought in which communication is conceived as a
process whereby information is transmitted.
Reader: the active interpreter of a message.
Reading: Hall et al. conceive of three distinct ‘varieties’:
a) Dominant-hegemonic: the ‘intended’ meaning or ‘preferred’ reading
b) Negotiated: an interpretation of a text that identifies the dominant reading but
also seeks to mediate this
c) Oppositional: any reading that rejects or significantly ‘quarrels’ with the
dominant reading and/or presents different/contrary meanings.
Receiver: someone to whom a message is directed.
Register: a form of linguistic performance which is responsive to the situation in
which communication is taking place.
Semiotics: the study of signs and how they communicate.
Sender: the originator of communication.
Sign: That which stands for or represents an object, idea or mental concept.
Symbol: an arbitrary sign that works by the agreement among people as to what it
represents.
Text: this term is used to refer to anything which can be 'read' for meaning. In this
sense, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a bowler hat, a television advertisement and
Buckingham Palace are all texts.
d (ii) Toolkits: Useful
Aberrant decoding: ‘reading’ a text in any way other than as it is intended, usually
because the receiver does not share a knowledge and understanding of the code or
codes used by the sender.
Discourse: a system of representation based on the reality of communication in
specific contexts (practice rather than theory).
.
Entropy: a communication that is high on new information and that is highly
unpredictable is said to be entropic.
Hegemony: the Italian writer Antonio Gramsci explained why the majority of people
in a culture do not adopt the values and beliefs of their own class. He argued that the
dominant minority within cultures present the values and beliefs of their own class as
somehow ‘natural’ and thus universal. In this way people end up promoting the
values and beliefs of the dominant or ruling class rather than of their own class.
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Teacher Resource Bank / GCE Communication and Culture / Other Guidance: AS Key Terms / Version 1.0
Ideology: a system of representation which reveals (and conceals) social values and
the values of those who have most influence in society.
Intention (purpose): what the sender wants an act of communication to ‘do’.
Mode of address: this term describes the way in which a text ‘speaks’ to its
audience. The text incorporates assumptions about its audience. If you can answer
the question ‘Who does this text think I am?’ you are on the way to identifying its
mode of address.
Motivation: in addition to the everyday meaning of ‘a force that drives us’, motivation
is a term used in semiotics to refer to the relationship between the physical form of a
sign and the thing or idea it represents. A photograph of a cat is a highly motivated
(or iconic sign) whilst the word ‘cat’ has low motivation (it is an arbitrary sign).
Myth: ‘a culture’s way of conceptualising an abstract topic’: a collection of concepts
bound together by general acceptance and significant in our understanding of
particular kinds of experience: a collective connotation.
Narrative: the way in which a text reveals information to the audience in order to
create a ‘story’.
Paradigm: a set of signs from which one might be chosen to contribute to a syntagm.
Paradigms define their individual members with reference to all others in the set. To
select from a paradigm is at that moment to reject all other signs in that set, just as
by selecting something (or nothing) to cover your feet today, you have rejected all
other possibilities; this choice from a paradigm of ‘foot coverings’ has contributed to
the syntagms which constitute the things you are wearing today. When Peugeot’s
‘lion’ went ‘from strength to strength’, it got its strength partly from the paradigm of
‘elite animals’ from which it was chosen and partly because that paradigm does not
include ‘weasel’, ‘frog’ and ‘sloth’.
Polysemy/Polysemic: refers to the capacity of a text or part of a text to be read in
several different ways. For example, a red rose might communicate love, a fondness
for horticulture, a political allegiance or Lancashire.
Redundancy: a communication that is low on new information and which is highly
predictable is said to be redundant.
Relay: Barthes used the term relay to describe text/image relationships which were
'complementary'.
Signifier/signified: according to Saussure, the basic unit of communication is the
sign. The sign is composed of two elements – the signifier and the signified. The
signifier is the physical form of the sign; for example, a written or spoken word or a
photograph. The signified is the mental concept triggered by the signifier. When you
see the signifier HORSE you think of a horse (the signified). Of course, neither one of
these is a real horse. The first is a carefully designed but miniscule quantity of ink on
the page; the second is an abstract idea. The signifier and the signified unite to form
the sign, but the relationship between the two elements is an arbitrary one, that is,
there is no logical or necessary relationship between them. That’s why it’s possible to
change which signifier relates to which signified; there are no absolute rules
connecting the signifier and the signified. If you had no knowledge of English or you
could not read, then the signifier HORSE would not attach itself to a signified in your
mind. If you speak French, you will recognise the signifier CHEVAL.
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Teacher Resource Bank / GCE Communication and Culture / Other Guidance: AS Key Terms / Version 1.0
Signification: what signs do: the process of signifying.
Syntagm: a chain of signs, a unique combination of sign choices. Units may be
visual, verbal or musical. The scale of the units and syntagms may range from the
very large (the nine planned episodes of the Star Wars triple trilogy might constitute a
syntagm) to the very small (as in the syntagm ‘I like noodles’ which consists of the
signs ‘I’, ‘like’ and ‘noodles’). The important point is that syntagms invite negotiation
as a whole; they are bigger units of potential meaning. The signs which comprise a
syntagm are organised in accordance with the ‘rules’ or conventions of the relevant
code.
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