Philippine E-Journals

The Role of Communication Skills in the Development of the English Program

Rustica C. Carpio

Discipline: Communications

 

Abstract:

Numerous are the theories of communication and this paper presents those are expected to help teachers and academic managers establish and appreciate the role of communication skills in the development of their school’s English program. It matters that communication skills be closely linked to the development of a language, the English language, for instance, since the words we utter are so related to the world we inhabit. The theory of linguistic relativity, or what has come to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis , provides that the structure of a culture’s language determines the behavior and habits of thinking in that culture. From this hypothesis can be gleaned the fact that a person’s thought processes and the way he/she sees the world are shaped by the grammatical structure of the language. The structure of the language greatly infl uences the person’s ways of perceiving reality.