Browsing by Author "Linnanmäki, Nea"

In the recent years, there has been increase in noticing the importance of interaction skills from the point of view of students as well as teachers’ in the discussion of learning. In the research field awareness of the interaction skills is also recent. The terminology that it includes is hence fairly inconsistent, which complicates understanding and action progressing of the interaction phenomena. The aim of this research paper is to support research and customs of communication skills by clarifying understanding of one term essentially related to communicative skills: social awareness. In my research, I examine how the concept of social awareness is defined in different researches. The aim is to survey the meaning and nature of social awareness term from the perspective of different researchers’ definitions, and to define what is meant with the term. The type of my research is a literary review. As a more specific analysing method I used term analysis, which enabled theoretical examining and interpreting of different definitions. The data of this research was sixteen articles which definitions of social awareness I compared and classified. Hence the research has also phenomenographical features in a sense that I brought together different researchers’ perceptions of social awareness and I examined what similarities and differences these definitions had. The results indicate that the concept of social awareness does not have settled definition in the research field. Different researchers define the term in different ways; some of the researchers define the term more broadly and leave unmentioned something that some other definitions bring up. On the other hand, the term appeared so overall that its sensible use in practise would always require its defining with subordinates. Based on the results, it can be proposed that social awareness should be divided into smaller subordinates, so it can be used straightforwardly and more practically in a more comprehensible way. Based on the analysis, the central elements of the term social awareness were clarified which helps understanding the term and relating its different definitions. Altogether the results of the research enlighten the usage of the term social awareness in research and offer tools to clarify term’s defining in research field and in practical work.