L’ensenyament-aprenentatge de la competència comunicativa escrita com a competència transversal en els currículums TIC de la UOC

Abstract

The European Space for Higher Education (ESHE) puts forward the need of a learning process based on skills. Thus, considering that university students should write texts of various academic genres, the learning process of written communicative skills must be essential in the university curricula of every branch of knowledge.

Moreover, the growing intervention of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the learning-teaching processes at university makes it necessary to redefine the more and more blurred borders between oral and written communication. In fact, ICT gives birth to discourse genres quite close to orality regarding some linguistic phenomena such as deixis, impersonalization and lexical cohesion by means of repetition. This situation enhances the need to establish the pragmatic borders of written academic discourse, which, notwithstanding the inherent features of whatever science, should be the same or, at least, similar in every academic discipline.

This paper is based on our experience as consultants or supervisors on Competències comunicatives per a professionals de les TIC, a general subject on communicative skills in the curricula of Computer Engineering and Telecommunication Engineering of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). Thus, the linguistic contents stricto sensu are excentric for the students to whom the subject is addressed, a situation which demands to apply a scrupulous communicative viewpoint when discussing linguistic concepts.

Within the framework of text linguistics, the quantitative analysis of the corpus, related to person deixis, impersonality and lexical cohesion, shows the suitability of a top-down model of teaching the production of academic texts, i.e. a process starting in and within the pragmatic context and arriving at the linguistic microstructure.

Furthermore, the success of this experience is underlined by the results of a set of sociopedagogical variables related to the degree of the students’ satisfaction with the subject.