Welcome to this video about communication barriers. Quite often when you're talking to someone, you might across this situation where you feel like you're talking to a wall. There can be many reasons for this. There are different barriers that might occur that inhibit or stop your message or the meaning that you wanna get through to the other person. Quite often your result might be this. They're saying I don't understand because there's some sort of barrier between the two of you but what you need to do is you need to bring them forward. You need to get the barrier behind them or gone all together, so that they can understand what you're trying to say. By the end of this video, we're gonna review some things that we've already talked about and by the end of this video, you should be able to identify possible communication barriers. The whole point of this is to reflect, and review, and identify different barriers that might occur. We've already mentioned a couple of them in a previous lecture on verbal and nonverbal communication but we're gonna go into a little bit more detail and listing of the different barriers that might occur in any kind of communication. One of the major barriers that often occur is inadequate knowledge. If the people within a conversation or a communication situation don't share the same knowledge, you might find yourself running into difficulties when you're trying to convey a meaning. It's important for you, in any kind of business situation, to make sure that you are aware of the variety of knowledge within your group that you're communicating to. You should adjust your language, you should adjust what you're saying according to the knowledge of the group and the meaning that needs to be conveyed within that group. Of course, with knowledge there's also the idea of vocabulary. Sometimes people have an inadequate vocabulary, so you have to be aware that the words that you choose need to be interpreted, need to be decoded by the people that you're speaking to. If you're talking to an audience who are not experienced people in your field, you would want to choose your vocabulary carefully. You would want to make sure the words you choose are words that they understand. If you give them very technical words, there's a good chance that you're creating a barrier. They won't listen, they won't understand what you're trying to say. That could be very problematic, especially if it's a high stakes type of conversation. Of course, there will always be differences of interpretation, people will interpret different things differently and that's why it's often important that you define certain key terms that you're talking about. By defining them before you go into more detail, you're setting the stage or ensuring that everyone within your group that you're communicating with should have the same interpretation of what you're saying. Language differences will always come into play. If you're in a group where people's first language is not the same as yours and you're using English as a lingua franca, you may run into difficulties. Second language barriers could cause issues such as vocabulary issues, interpretation issues and knowledge issues, so it's a combination of those that might play a role with language differences. You also need to avoid the use of inappropriate expressions. Certain situations call for certain expressions. You would not want to use informal slang in a very formal type of situation and you also want to make sure that your language is concise. In our lecture video on comparing and contrasting for example, we talk about the importance of following through on the comparison. Quite often, when people are comparing things, they don't complete the comparison. You need to be precise with your language. If you're not precise with your language, your main message could get lost. Remember, it might make sense in your own head but if it doesn't make sense to them because of ambiguity, you're in trouble. Finally, one of the things that might cause a barrier are cultural differences and this could be with indirect language versus direct language. We'll go into a lot more detail about that later on in the course in this specialization on intercultural communication. Nonverbal barriers that you need to be aware of are things like inappropriate or conflicting signals. Your hand gestures might not align with what your saying and you might be creating some sort of barrier between you and the person. You might be using inappropriate hand signals, or inappropriate facial expressions. So be careful, be aware, know your audience, know what's appropriate, and you might have, again, differences in perception. This could be because of where you are, where you're situated within the environment. You might have inappropriate emotions. These are things that will come up later on, in later courses in this specialization, particularly when we're talking about intercultural communication. And then, there's distractions. You need to be aware of certain distractions that might be within the environment or in people's thoughts. How are they creating some sort of barrier? Knowing your audience, knowing who they are, knowing the demographics of your audience, knowing the environment that your audience is in, knowing the needs of the audience, that can help you avoid certain distractions. Again, this is something we'll go into more detail when we discuss about audience awareness, audience analysis, and matching audience to purpose. If you're aware of these barriers, you should be able to overcome them, and you can avoid people misunderstanding what you're saying. You can bring them to the foreground. You can make sure that what you're trying to communicate is getting across. Now you should be able to identify possible communication barriers. This video has basically revisited some of the concepts that we've already talked about but it's also to help you become more aware that these issues will come up later on in other lectures and other courses. Don't forget, barriers will happen but as long as you're aware of those barriers, you should be able to overcome them by using different language strategies. Thank you.
