Communication & language foundations
The Communication Process
At its heart, teaching is an act of communication, and the classic models give us a practical map of how that act unfolds. A sender starts with an idea, turns it into words, gestures, and images (encoding), routes it through a channel, and a receiver reconstructs meaning from those signals (decoding). Two forces decide whether the exchange works: noise, which is anything that distorts the signal in transit, and feedback, which is the receiver's response telling the sender whether the idea actually landed. A later and essential refinement adds that a message only takes hold where the sender's and receiver's experiences overlap. For a teacher, the takeaway is humbling and useful: the message you intend is not automatically the message a student receives. The job is to build the message so the specific learner in front of you can decode it, then read their feedback to confirm it worked and re-shape it when it did not.
Where it comes from
The idea began in engineering. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949) diagrammed communication as a flow from an information source through a transmitter, a channel, and a receiver to a destination, and they gave the field its lasting term for interference: noise. David Berlo (1960) reworked this into the SMCR model (Source, Message, Channel, Receiver) and argued that the communication skills, knowledge, attitudes, social system, and culture of both the source and the receiver shape whether a message succeeds. Wilbur Schramm (1954), often described as a founding figure of communication studies, added the field of experience: the insight that communication happens only in the zone where the backgrounds of sender and receiver overlap. He also reframed the model as a circular, two-way process driven by feedback rather than a one-directional broadcast.
Why it matters for emergent bilingual students
Emergent bilinguals arrive with deep, well-developed fields of experience rooted in their home languages and cultures, just not always the same English-medium frame a lesson assumes. That existing knowledge is the ground you build on, not a gap to repair. When a learner does not catch a point, the communication model offers a far more constructive diagnosis than faulting the student: the breakdown usually lives in the encoding (the message was not built for this receiver) or in noise (unfamiliar vocabulary, rapid speech, a culturally unfamiliar example), rather than in the learner's ability or potential. That keeps the teacher's attention on adjusting the message and the channel, which is an asset-based move, and it connects naturally to Krashen's (1982) notion of comprehensible input: knowing your receiver well is exactly what lets you pitch a message at a level the learner can decode while still drawing on the rich knowledge they already hold in their home language. In the Texas ELPS context, this is the theory underneath the expectation that every teacher is also a language teacher, and underneath the linguistic accommodations called for at each proficiency level, from Pre-Production through Advanced.
In your classroom
Plan and teach from the receiver backward by asking three questions. First, what does this student already know and bring, their field of experience, that I can anchor this idea to? Second, what noise might block the message right now, such as unknown words, a missing visual, a rushed pace, or anxiety? Third, how will I gather real feedback that the message was decoded the way I intended? Then act on the answers: encode for this learner with visuals, gestures, realia, and home-language bridges; strip out the noise; and check understanding through student talk or a short task rather than a single "Does everyone understand?" Read a puzzled expression as feedback signaling that you should re-encode, not as proof that the student cannot learn the material.
Common misconception to avoid
The common error is to picture communication as a one-way pipe: if I said it clearly, then I delivered it, so any breakdown must be the student's fault. The models point in the opposite direction. Transmitting a message is not the same as having it received. Meaning is rebuilt by the receiver through their own field of experience, and noise can interfere on any channel between the two people. A message that feels perfectly clear to you can still fail to decode for a learner whose experience does not overlap with your examples. The correction is to design from the receiver's side, to expect that you will sometimes need to re-encode, and to treat the learner's feedback, rather than your own sense that you "covered the material," as the evidence that the message actually arrived.
Research basis
Communication can be modeled as a process in which an information source sends a message through a transmitter and channel to a receiver and destination, with 'noise' acting as interference that distorts the signal along the way.
Shannon, C. E., & Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. University of Illinois Press. [link]
The SMCR model frames communication in terms of Source, Message, Channel, and Receiver, and holds that the communication skills, knowledge, attitudes, social system, and culture of both the source and the receiver shape whether a message is successfully encoded and decoded.
Berlo, D. K. (1960). The process of communication: An introduction to theory and practice. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Communication succeeds only where the sender's and receiver's fields of experience overlap, and feedback makes the process a circular, two-way exchange rather than a one-directional transmission.
Schramm, W. (1954). How communication works. In W. Schramm (Ed.), The process and effects of mass communication (pp. 3–26). University of Illinois Press.
Comprehensible input theory holds that learners acquire a second language most effectively when they receive messages they can understand, which supports the practice of pitching a message at a level the specific learner can decode.
Krashen, S. D. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Pergamon Press.
Teacher-preparation scholarship applies communication and second language acquisition theory to argue that teachers must make messages comprehensible to emergent bilinguals by knowing the learner and reducing barriers to understanding, an explicitly asset-based stance.
Wright, W. E. (2019). Foundations for teaching English language learners: Research, theory, policy, and practice (3rd ed.). Caslon.
Written in our own words and grounded in Wright’s Foundations for Teaching English Language Learners and the primary theorists; reviewed by an independent SLA specialist and an adversarial citation audit.
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