LET Review · General Education English · Topic 1 · 1 of 16
Communication processes, principles and ethics
The elements and process of communication, the major models from Aristotle to the transactional view, the principles, the types by mode, context, purpose and style, and the ethics of communication.
What the board asks
On the LET General Education test, Purposive Communication items rarely ask you to recite a definition word for word. They put a teacher, student, employee or barangay official in a short situation and ask you to name the element, model, principle, type or ethical issue at work, or to choose the best action. A handful of items are plain recall: who proposed a model, what its parts are, or what a term means. Know the vocabulary cold, then practise applying it.
Must-know facts
| Item | Fact to know | How it is asked |
|---|---|---|
| Aristotle | Speaker, speech, audience; ethos (credibility), pathos (emotion), logos (logic) | A speaker cites facts: logos. A speaker tells a moving story: pathos. |
| Lasswell (1948) | Who says what in which channel to whom with what effect | Match each question to the element; remember it has no feedback or noise. |
| Shannon–Weaver (1949) | Source, transmitter, signal, channel, receiver, destination, noise; linear; from telephone engineering | Identify noise; recognize that the model has no feedback. |
| Berlo SMCR (1960) | Source, message, channel, receiver; skills, attitudes, knowledge, social system, culture; channel = the five senses; linear | Which factor is the problem: skills, attitude, knowledge, social system or culture? |
| Schramm (1954) | Interactive and circular; encoder, decoder, interpreter; field of experience; feedback | Misunderstanding because the fields of experience do not overlap. |
| Transactional | Simultaneous sending and receiving in a shared context | Both people react while talking; the receiver is not passive. |
| Principles | Process, symbolic, contextual, irreversible, unavoidable, meaning is in people | A scenario illustrates one principle; name it. |
| Types by context | Intrapersonal, interpersonal, small group, public, mass, organizational (downward, upward, horizontal) | Identify the context from the setting and number of people. |
| Ethics | Honesty, respect, acknowledgment of sources, accountability, privacy; misinformation vs. disinformation; RA 10173 | Pick the ethical or unethical action. |
Exam alert. Four traps recur. (1) Shannon–Weaver, Lasswell, Berlo and Aristotle are linear; only Schramm is interactive, and transactional models are a separate group. (2) Misinformation is false but not deliberate; disinformation is false and deliberate. (3) Intention is not required for a message to exist: silence and body language still communicate. (4) Public communication is a speaker before a live audience; mass communication reaches a large, scattered audience through media.
Common traps
- Noise is not only sound. Worry, anger, prejudice, an unfamiliar word and a weak signal are all noise. Look for what blocks the message, not for a loud place.
- Feedback is not always spoken. A frown, a nod or a blank look is feedback, and silence after "You all understood?" is feedback to read.
- Channel is not message. The channel is the medium (a text message, a radio program); the message is the content.
- Formal does not mean difficult. Formal language is careful and conventional, not full of long words.
- Purpose versus effect. The purpose is what the sender aims for; the effect is what actually happens.
- Interpersonal versus small group. Two people is interpersonal. A few people working toward a shared goal is small group.
- Ethics is not only about not lying. Plagiarism, fabricated quotations, breaching privacy, stereotyping and sharing unverified posts are ethical failures too.
How to read a scenario item
- Find who is communicating. Count the people and note the setting; this fixes the context.
- Find what went right or wrong. Look for the signal word: misunderstood (decoding or field of experience), could not hear (noise), deleted but already shared (irreversible), silent but upset (unavoidable).
- Name the concept. Match it to the vocabulary above before you look at the options.
- Read all four options. Two options often name correct concepts that do not fit this scenario. Choose the one that fits the facts given.
- For "best action" items, prefer the option that checks understanding, respects the audience, acknowledges sources, verifies before sharing or protects privacy.
Example. A teacher in Pangasinan reads a long announcement aloud, but pupils in the back cannot hear because of construction outside. The question asks what hindered communication. The context is a classroom; the message did not arrive clearly; the construction sound interfered, so the concept is physical noise. A tempting distractor, "lack of feedback," describes something the pupils might do next but not what blocked the message.
Read each distractor and ask why it fails. A distractor that names a real term, such as decoding or channel, is the usual wrong answer: it is correct vocabulary pinned to the wrong situation.