Communication REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

2.2 Communication

Being a social creature, a human being inevitably needs communication. The human communication can be realized by means of many things, such as a style of hair, a black shirt, commentary, etc. Someone knows what somebody else is going to do by only looking at her hair style, what she wears, or even the comment she gives to a given thing. However the communication that this study concerns is not related to the ones mentioned above, it is a communication which takes place with the language as the medium -- the language communication. Generally, a communication is defined as a social interaction through messages. With regards to it, there are two schools of language communication, a process school and a semiotic school. The former views a communication as the social interaction through messages Fiske , 1990:2. This implies that this school sees the communication as the transmission of messages by which one person affects the behaviour of another. The latter views the communication as the production and exchange of meanings Fiske, 1990:2. This school concerns with how messages or texts interact with people in order to produce meanings. Comparing the two, they differ in their understanding of what constitutes a message. The process school believes that intention is a crucial factor in deciding what constitutes a message. Whereas the semiotic school believes that a message is the construction of signs, which, through interacting with a receiver, produces meanings. The message, for the process school, is affected by the sender’s intention. Whereas for semiotic school, it is affected by the receiver, how he interprets the received message. The study of this dissertation belongs to the semiotic school, here the meanings of a reading text are analyzed in terms of its rhetorical development and lexicogrammar. When the text is being analyzed, its messages in the form signs interact with the researcher acting as the receiver producing meanings. The emphasis of the semiotic school is on the text and how it is read. Reading is the process of discovering meanings which takes place when the reader interacts or negotiates with it. In doing so she brings with herhim the aspects of herhis cultural experience which have relation to the codes and signs which make up the text. It also involves some of herhis shared understanding of what the text is about. The three aspects involved in the process of discovering meanings of the text, the reader or the producer, the message in the form of a text and the referent, are illustrated in the figure below. They dynamically interact each other to discoverproduce the text meanings. Fig.2 Message and Meaning adopted from Fiske,1990:4 To be able to discover the meanings of a text, however, someone should have sufficient communicative competence that is explained in the following sub- chapter.

2.3 Communicative Competence