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and judicial sessions, where problems of communication are of critical importance, is the
domain of applied pragmatics.
3. Sociology and psychology produced the first academic studies of mass
communication during the 1930’s. American sociologists studied the audiences of
various radio programs and the effects of radio and TV broadcasting on the public.
During World War II many scholars began to study propaganda, public opinion and how
persuasive communication causes people to modify their beliefs.
4. Cybernetics and information theory. Cybernetics studies how information is
transmitted by the nervous systems of living things and by the control mechanisms of
machines. Its important part is the study of feedback by which devices and organisms
regulate themselves. Information theory deals with the mathematical laws that govern
communication, especially the factors that interfere with the transmission of a message.
5. The study of nonverbal communication, sometimes called body language, is the oldest
area of investigation into human communication which includes kinesics, proxemics and
chronemics. Kinesics refers to gesture, facial expression, eye contact, and body posture.
Proxemics includes uses of touch and personal space. Chronemics studies how human
beings communicate through their use of time.

7. METHODOLOGIES OF COMMUNICATION STUDIES
Studies in language, culture, and communication are based on two compatible
methodologies: ethnographic and sociolinguistic.
An ethnographic or ethnolinguistic approach, employs anthropological techniques of
gathering data from observations of people's daily lives and of attempting to understand
behaviour from the participants' point of view. Ethnolinguists try to extract communicative
rules by observing the behaviours that do or do not occur in various contexts and the
reactions of members of a community to each other's actions.
Studying language use within speech communities from an ethnolinguistic approach
includes analysis of contexts, norms of appropriateness, and knowledge of language and
its uses. Analysis of these facets of communicative behaviour reveal underlying cultural
models and demonstrate the cognitive and conceptual bonds that unify people within their
culture.
Ethnolinguists also use elicitation techniques for obtaining linguistic data. They work
with individual native speakers in order to collect material dealing with specific categories of
vocabulary or types of grammatical constructions.
The second approach is sociolinguistic. This method is concerned with discovering
patterns of linguistic variation. Variation in language use is derived from differences in
speech situations and from social distinctions within a community that are reflected in
communicative performance. Although some speech differences are idiosyncratic, it is
possible to study intracommunity variables by recording and analyzing actual speech
behaviour of members of distinct sectors of population.