Teaching Interpersonal Communication: Listening, Adaptive Communication and Interconnection Skills

This chapter helps you teach interpersonal communication skills for engineering students. It focuses on one-to-one interactions based on three skills: active listening (perceiving and interpreting verbal and non-verbal messages), adaptive communication (integrating perspectives to negotiate meaning and adjust communicative choices), and interconnection (building and sustaining constructive professional relationships over time). For each skill, we define subskills and provide implementable teaching guidance, including activities, short practice drills, and feedback and reflection prompts that support transfer into project work, stakeholder engagement, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Interpersonal communication does not succeed or fail only at the level of technique; emotion cues, competing perspectives, and identity-based dynamics shape what people notice, how they interpret it, and what feels permissible to say or do. To assist in the operationalisation of these concepts, we pair each interpersonal communication skill with a social dimension: social emotions help students identify affective cues that guide attention and inference in listening, perspective taking helps students to surface and to work with divergent framings in adaptive communication, and social identity helps students anticipate trust and status dynamics that shape interconnection. This chapter will help you teach students to predict, avoid, and repair communication breakdowns by choosing appropriate learning scaffolds, and designing activities and assessment that treat interpersonal communication skills as part of professional engineering competence.