GE-300 Functional English: Communication, Vocabulary, and Reading Skills

Vocabulary flashcards covering core concepts from GE-300 Functional English: communication process, language metafunctions, word formation, reading strategies (skimming, scanning, comprehension), and analytical text interpretation.

Functional English

The practical application of English to achieve specific communicative purposes in real-life academic and professional situations, focusing on language selection according to purpose, audience, and context.

Language System

A structured system of symbols, patterns, and rules used by humans to express ideas, experiences, knowledge, and emotions, serving as a social resource to create meaning and relationships.

Stylistics in Grammar

The study of how grammatical choices, syntactic structures, and language patterns create different styles, tones, and communicative effects.

Receptive Skills

Language skills that involve receiving and processing incoming information, specifically listening and reading.

Productive Skills

Language skills that involve actively creating and transmitting messages, specifically speaking and writing.

Communication

The systematic process of exchanging information, ideas, and meanings between a sender and receiver through a channel to achieve shared understanding.

Encoding

The process in communication of converting internal thoughts and ideas into words, symbols, or signals.

Decoding

The process in communication of interpreting received signals or words and assigning meaning to them.

Feedback

The response sent from the receiver back to the sender showing whether and how effectively the message was understood.

Kinesics

The study of body movements, gestures, posture, facial expressions, and body orientation as a form of non-verbal communication.

Oculesics

The study of eye behavior and eye contact in communication to convey confidence, engagement, interest, or respect.

Proxemics

The study of how individuals utilize physical space and interpersonal distance to communicate social relationships, authority, and comfort.

Paralanguage

Non-verbal vocal features of spoken communication—such as tone, pitch, volume, speech rate, and pauses—that shape how verbal words are interpreted.

Ideational Metafunction

A functional role of language used to represent human experiences, events, actions, ideas, and information about the world.

Interpersonal Metafunction

A functional role of language used to establish relationships, express attitudes, opinions, and emotions, and negotiate social roles between people.

Textual Metafunction

A functional role of language used to organize information into a coherent, meaningful, and logically structured message.

Register

The variety of language chosen based on the situation, purpose, and audience (e.g., academic, professional, or casual registers).

Context

The situational background, circumstances, and conditions surrounding communication that influence how a message is interpreted.

Cohesion

The explicit linguistic links between sentences established through transitional devices, reference words, and lexical ties.

Coherence

The underlying logical connection, unity, and clear structural progression of ideas in a text.

Pragmatics

The study of how context and speaker intention influence meaning beyond the literal definitions of words.

Communication Barriers

Interfering factors—such as ambiguous wording, technical jargon, cultural discrepancies, or inadequate feedback—that impede successful understanding.

Vocabulary

The entire repertoire of words that an individual understands and uses in listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

Word Formation

The morphological process through which a language generates new lexical items from existing words or meaningful morphemic units.

Morpheme

The smallest indivisible linguistic unit that carries meaning or performs a grammatical function.

Free Morpheme

A morpheme capable of standing alone as an independent word with its own meaning (e.g., "help", "kind").

Bound Morpheme

A morpheme that cannot stand alone as a word and must attach to another element (e.g., prefixes like "un-" or suffixes like "-ness").

Root

The primary, irreducible lexical unit of a word that carries its fundamental meaning before any affixes are attached.

Base

Any stem or word form to which an affix is added during word formation.

Affixation

The morphological process of attaching a prefix or suffix to a base to modify meaning or word class.

Prefixation

The process of adding a bound morpheme to the beginning of a base, primarily modifying meaning without changing its grammatical class.

Suffixation

The process of attaching a bound morpheme to the end of a base, frequently changing the word's grammatical category.

Derivation

A word-formation process that creates a distinct dictionary word by adding an affix, often shifting the word's grammatical class or meaning.

Inflection

A grammatical modification of a word to signal attributes such as tense, number, or comparison without generating a new dictionary entry.

Compounding

The process of combining two or more freestanding words or bases to create a single unit of meaning (e.g., "notebook").

Conversion

The word-formation process (also called zero derivation) of shifting a word into a new grammatical category without changing its form or adding affixes.

Clipping

The shortening of an existing polysyllabic word while preserving its core meaning and word class (e.g., "laboratory" to "lab").

Blending

The process of joining parts of two distinct words—typically the start of one and the end of another—to form a new lexical unit (e.g., "smog").

Acronym

An abbreviation formed from the initial letters of a compound term that is pronounced sequentially as a word (e.g., NASA).

Initialism

An abbreviation formed from initial letters where each letter is sounded out individually (e.g., BBC, CPU).

Back-formation

The creation of a new word by removing a perceived affix from an existing word, typically resulting in a change in word class (e.g., "editor" to "edit").

Borrowing

The linguistic adoption and integration of words from other languages into English vocabulary (e.g., "algebra", "shampoo").

Word Family

A cluster of related words that share a common base or root across various grammatical classes (such as noun, verb, adjective, adverb).

Collocation

A habitual, natural co-occurrence of words that regularly appear together in fluent English (e.g., "conduct research", "meet a deadline").

Semantic Mapping

A visual vocabulary strategy of organizing semantically related words around a central theme to display conceptual links.

Skimming

A rapid reading strategy aimed at getting the general subject, central idea, or overall structural organization of a text without reading every word.

Scanning

A quick reading strategy of moving the eyes through a text to pinpoint a specific piece of information, such as a date, name, or statistic.

Literal Comprehension

The understanding of information, facts, and statements that are directly and explicitly stated in a text.

Inferential Comprehension

The process of drawing logical conclusions and deducing implicit meanings by connecting textual clues with background knowledge.

Evaluative Comprehension

The critical assessment of the credibility, validity, quality, and effectiveness of a text's arguments and supporting evidence.

Context Clues

Hints, explanations, antonyms, synonyms, or examples found in surrounding sentences that assist a reader in inferring the meaning of an unfamiliar word.

Analytical Reading

A purposeful, thorough method of reading where the reader investigates an author's ideas, structure, linguistic choices, and evidence to explain how meaning is constructed.

Text Interpretation

The analytical process of explaining the deeper meaning and significance of a passage by evaluating its diction, context, organization, and potential implications.

Previewing

A pre-reading strategy involving brief examination of titles, subheadings, introductions, and text layout to anticipate content and formulate focus questions.

Topic

The general subject or broad area that a text addresses, usually expressed as a word or brief phrase.

Main Idea

The central assertion, message, or primary point that an author conveys about a topic, usually expressed as a complete sentence.

Topic Sentence

A sentence that states the central point or main focus of a paragraph.

Supporting Details

Specific facts, explanations, examples, or justifications that substantiate, develop, and clarify the central claim of a paragraph or text.

Text Structure

The organizational framework used to arrange ideas in a text, such as description, sequence, cause and effect, comparison and contrast, or problem and solution.

Tone

The perspective, emotional stance, or attitude conveyed through an author's specific stylistic choices and word selections.

Fact

An objective statement whose accuracy can be verified and confirmed through empirical evidence, documentation, or direct observation.

Opinion

A subjective statement expressing a personal belief, value judgment, or preference that cannot be objectively verified.

Claim

An assertion or proposition put forward by a writer that requires supporting proof and evidence to establish its validity.

Evidence

Objective information, empirical data, quotations, examples, and verifiable source references used to validate an argument or claim.

Inference

A deduction or reasonable conclusion drawn from textual clues and prior knowledge rather than from directly stated facts.

Assumption

An underlying belief or proposition taken for granted by an author without providing explicit proof or documentation.

Viewpoint

The specific perspective, stance, or position from which an author interprets and discusses a subject.

Bias

A subjective inclination or prejudice that influences the selection, interpretation, or presentation of information.

Argument

A structured series of statements comprising a central claim supported by logical reasons and verifiable evidence.

Denotation

The literal, explicit, and conventional dictionary definition of a word.

Connotation

The emotional associations, cultural nuances, and implied feelings that a word carries beyond its literal definition.

Paraphrasing

The practice of rewriting another author's ideas in your own words and sentence patterns while maintaining complete accuracy to the original meaning.

Summarizing

The process of condensing a text into a concise overview of its central points while excluding peripheral details, examples, and repetition.

Functional English

A practical approach to language learning where English is used effectively to achieve specific communicative purposes in real-life situations, focusing on language choices suited to purpose, audience, and context.

Language

A structured system of symbols and rules used by humans to express ideas, experiences, knowledge, and emotions, serving as a social resource to create meanings and establish relationships.

Grammar

The system of rules and patterns that explains how words are arranged to form meaningful sentences.

Stylistics in Grammar

The study of how grammatical choices, sentence structures, and language patterns create different styles, tones, and effects in communication.

Receptive Skills

Language skills that involve receiving and understanding information, specifically listening and reading.

Productive Skills

Language skills that involve producing and expressing messages, specifically speaking and writing.

Active Listening

A purposeful effort to receive, understand, evaluate, and respond to spoken messages.

Communication

The process of exchanging information, ideas, and meanings between a sender and receiver to achieve shared understanding.

Encoding

The process of converting ideas and thoughts into words, symbols, or signals in the communication process.

Decoding

The process of interpreting a message to understand and give meaning to its words, tone, or symbols.

Feedback

The response from the receiver that indicates whether the transmitted message was accurately understood.

Kinesics

The study of body movements, gestures, posture, facial expressions, and eye behavior as forms of non-verbal communication.

Oculesics

The study of eye behavior and eye contact in communication, demonstrating confidence, interest, respect, and involvement.

Proxemics

The study of how individuals use physical space and distance during communication to convey social relationships and authority.

Paralanguage

Non-verbal vocal features of speech—such as tone, pitch, volume, speed, and pauses—that influence how a message is interpreted.

Ideational Metafunction

The use of language to represent experiences, events, ideas, actions, and factual information about the world.

Interpersonal Metafunction

The use of language to establish relationships, express attitudes, opinions, emotions, and define social roles between people.

Textual Metafunction

The use of language to organize information into a coherent, meaningful, and logically structured message.

Register

The variation of language according to situation, purpose, and audience, such as academic, professional, or casual registers.

Cohesion

The grammatical and lexical connections linking sentences together through transition words, pronouns, and repeated concepts.

Coherence

The logical organization and consistency of ideas that make a whole text clear and unified.

Pragmatics

The study of how meaning depends on situational context, background conditions, and speaker intention rather than literal words alone.

Communication Barriers

Factors that prevent successful understanding between communicators, including unclear language, technical jargon, cultural differences, and poor feedback.

Vocabulary

The set of words that an individual knows, understands, and uses across speaking, listening, reading, and writing.

Word Formation

The process through which a language creates new words or develops new lexical items from existing words or meaningful elements.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of language that carries meaning or a distinct grammatical function.

Free Morpheme

A morpheme that can stand alone as an independent, meaningful word.