Oral communicative competence in the training of engineers for the 21st century

Abstract

This paper presents an action-research experience that was carried out with 12 students in their last semester of Civil Computer Engineering at a private Chilean university, whose objective was to contribute to the development of oral communicative competence from an academic and disciplinary point of view. A methodological distinction was made between formal and technical aspects that allowed the development of these skills through interdisciplinary work between engineering teachers and communication teachers thanks to the implementation of a didactic module that encouraged disciplinary communicative practice, self-evaluation, co-evaluation and timely feedback. The results obtained indicate that, at the group level, this experience contributed to obtaining scores with a narrower dispersion and shifted towards passing levels, while at the individual level, more than 90% of the students managed to improve their oral communicative performance.