Write a short summary of the text.

Text 8.

Read and translate the text.

Character and communication .

Communication is the most important skill in life. We spend most of our waking hours communicating. But consider this: You’ve spent years learning how to read and write,years learning how to speak. But what about listening? What training or education have you got that enables you to listen so that you really, deeply understand another human being from the individual’s own frame of reference?

Comparatively few people have had any training in listening at all. And, for the most part, their training has been in the personality ethic of technique, truncated from the character base and the relationship base absolutely vital to authentic understanding of another person.

If you want to interact effectively with me, to influence me- your spouse, your child, your neighbor, your boss, your coworker, your friend-you first need to understand me. And you can’t do that with technique alone. If I sense you’re using some technique, I sense duplicity, manipulation. I wonder why you’re doing it, what your motives are. And I don’t feel safe enough to open myself up to you.

The real key to your influence with me is your example, your actual conduct. Your example flows naturally out of your character,or the kind of person you truly are- not what others say you are or what you may want me to think you are.

It is evident in how I actually experience you.

Your character is constantly radiating, communicating. From it, in the Long run, I come to instinctively trust or distrust you and your efforts with me.

If your life runs hot and cold, if you’re both caustic and kind, and, above all, if your private performance doesn’t square with your public performance, it’s very hard for me to open up with you. Then, as much as I may want and even need to receive your love and influence, I don’t feel safe enough to expose my opinions and experiences and my tender feelings. Who knows what will happen?

But unless I open up with you, unless you understand me and my unique situation and feelings, you won’t know how to advise and counsel me. What you say is good and fine, but it doesn’t quite pertain to me.

You may say you care about and appreciate me. I desperately want to belive that. But how can you appreciate me when you don’t even understand me? All I have are your words, and I can’t trust words.

I’m too angry and defensive- perhaps too guilty and afraid- to be influenced, even though inside I know I need what you could tell me.

Unless you’re influenced by my uniqueness, I’m not going to be influenced by your advice. So if you want to be really effective in the habit of interpersonal communication, you cannot do it with technique alone. You have to build the skills of empathic listening on a base of character that inspires openness and trust. And you have to build the Emotional Bank Accounts that create a commerce between hearts.

 

2. Answer the following questions:

1. What are the basic types of communication? There are four of them, aren’t there?

2. Is it possible or impossible to learn communication skills for a short period of time?

3. What training or education should you have in order to communicate properly?

4. What is meant by effective interaction?

5. How would you interact with your spouse (your neighbor, your boss, your coworker, your child)?

6. Is there direct or indirect connection between character and communication?

7. Must we trust completely the words we hear in a conversation with the other person?

8. Are you in favor of or against empathic listening?

Write a short summary of the text.

Part III. Texts for written translation

Text 1.

Education and Ethnicity

 

Sociologists have carried out a good deal of research into the educational fortunes of ethnic minorities in Britain. Governments have also sponsored a series of investigations, including Education for all, the report of the Swan Committee. The Swann Report found significant differences in average levels of educational success between groups from different backgrounds. Children from West Indian families tended to fare worst at school, as measured by formal academic attainments. They have improved from ten years earlier, however. Asian children were equal to white children, in spite of the fact that on average the families from which they came were economically worse off than white families (Swann committee 1985).

Subsequent research indicates that the picture has shifted, however. Trevor Jones (1993) carried out research which indicated that children from all minority group backgrounds were more likely to continue on in full-time education from sixteen to nineteen than were white children. Only 37 per cent of white children stayed on in education in 1988-90, compared to 43 per cent from West-Indian backgrounds, 50 per cent of South Asians and 77 percent of Chinese.

In spite of this apparently positive picture, Jones suggested something of a negative reason. Many members of ethnic minority groups might stay on in education because of the problem of finding a job.

On the whole, members of ethnic minority groups are not under-represented in British higher education. In 19998, 13 per cent of students under the age of twenty who were enrolled in higher education were from ethnic minority backgrounds. Among the overall population of the same age, ethnic minorities comprise only 9 per cent of the population. Young people from Indian and Chinese backgrounds are more likely to carry on in higher education, while black Caribbean men and women and Bangladeshi and Pakistani women remain under-represented (HMSO 2000).

Text 2.

Lifelong Learning

 

New technologies and the rise of the knowledge economy are transforming traditional ideas about work and education. The sheer pace of technological pace is creating a much more rapid turnover of jobs than once was the case. Training and the attainment of qualifications is now occurring throughout people’s lives, rather than just once early in life. Mid-career professionals are choosing to update their skills through continuing education programmes and internet-based learning. Many employers now allow workers to participate in on-the-job training as a way of enhancing loyalty and improving the company skills base.

AS our society continues to transform, the traditional beliefs and institutions that underpin it are also undergoing change. The idea of education – implying the structured transmission of knowledge within a formal institution – is giving way to a broader notion of “learning” that takes place in a diversity of settings. The shift from “education” to “learning” is not an inconsequential one. Learners are active, curious social actors who can derive insights from a multiplicity of sources, not just within an institutional setting. Emphasis on learning acknowledges that skills and knowledge can be gained through all types of encounters – with friends and neighbours, at seminars and museums, in conversations at the local pub, through the internet and other media, and so forth.

The shift in emphasis towards lifelong learning can already be seen within schools themselves, where there are a growing number of opportunities for pupils to learn outside the confines of the classroom. The boundaries between schools and the outside world are breaking down, not only via cyberspace, but in the physical world as well. “Service learning”, for example, has become a mainstay of many American secondary schools. As part of their graduation requirements, pupils devote a certain amount of time to volunteer work in the community. Partnerships with local businesses have also become commonplace in the US and UK, fostering interaction and mentor relationships between adult professionals and pupils.

Lifelong learning should and must play a role in the move towards a knowledge society. Not only is it essential to a well-trained, motivated workforce, but learning should also be seen in relation to wider human values. Learning is both a means and an end to the development of a rounded and autonomous self-education in the service of self-development and self-understanding. There is nothing utopian in this idea; indeed it reflects the humanistic ideals of education developed by educational philosophers. An example already in existence is the “university of the third age”, which provides retired people with the opportunity to educate themselves as they choose, developing whatever interests they care to follow.

 

Text 3.