Professor Barnhurst: Introducing Us to Labov?

Professor Barnhurst began his lecture with an activity to teach the class about the similarities we all have telling stories.  We all tell stories in a similar fashion, starting with an announcement of the story or an abstract.  This lets the listener know what is to come.  We give listeners details such as who was involved, why it happened, and when it happened.  Then we have a response to the situation we were in, which is when we might say, “Then I walked out of the room!” or “I told him off!”  All of which give tons of insight to the receiver/listener (or decoder) on how we feel and think about what happened.

After revisiting Tubbs Transactional Model, Barnhurst’s storytelling lecture can be applied directly to Tubbs’ model.  If we apply Barnhurst’s storytelling steps to Tubbs Transactional Model it’s easy to break down and understand why storytelling happens so often and why it is so natural for us to use as an effective form of communication.  The encoder sends the message, an abstract, to the decoder.  The decoder then gets an idea of what the story will be about and sends back a message that they want to know more.  The next few passes in the conversation will bring the story to a climatic point and draw the conclusion.  From here, the message is clear with the help of intonation and body language.  

I think Barnhurst was basing this storytelling process on Labov, the sociolinguistic expert, if I heard him correctly because he seemed to care a lot about the tone of voice people were taking (and he mentioned Labov).  I think he was trying to go further with this idea of storytelling to also teach a bit about the tone people use.  In that case, this lecture would be opening the door to many of the other communication techniques we use and have learned about in Comm 101. Labov is interesting because he conducted observational research on communities; one I am familiar with is Martha’s Vineyard.  Labov compared the locals of the island to the tourists, but mostly focused on how the locals behaved and spoke.  Much of his results showed that what made locals different in comparison to the tourists had a lot to do with their tones of voice while either talking in their vernacular speech or a formal specch.  We touched a bit on voice clarity and volume in our class and I am sure there is much to cover on just the intonation of communication.   Overall this lecture was a very involved introduction to a part of our commonly used communication skills.