In Berlo’s S-M-C-R model what does ‘C’ stand for ?

Concept

A communication model names the essential components that every act of communication passes through and labels them in a fixed order. David Berlo's 1960 model, set out in The Process of Communication, analyses any communicative act into four such components and abbreviates them by their initials as S-M-C-R.

Application

1. Read the acronym in order. The first letter, S, stands for Source — the party that originates a message and encodes it.

2. The second letter, M, stands for Message — the encoded material itself, which Berlo describes through its content, elements, treatment, structure and code.

3. The third letter, C, stands for Channel — the sensory route along which the encoded message actually travels.

4. The fourth letter, R, stands for Receiver — the party that decodes the message, described by the same set of factors as the source.

So 'C' in S-M-C-R stands for Channel. Berlo treats the five senses — hearing, seeing, touching, smelling and tasting — as the channels of human communication, which is why a teacher who supports speech with a diagram is said to be using more than one channel at once.

Cross-check

• Communicator names the originating party, so it belongs at the S position of this model rather than the C position.

• Context — the physical, social and cultural setting of a communicative act — is a situational variable emphasised by later models, not one of Berlo's four named components.

• Content is one of the five elements Berlo lists inside the Message component, so it sits under M rather than standing as a component of its own.