ORAL PRESENTATION AS A (TECHNICAL/SOCIAL) COMPETENCE IN LITERARY SUBJECTS

To what extent should we teach our students what our global competitive society demands? Do we need to focus our efforts on more market-centered competences -professional, technical or social in each knowledge area- at times to the detriment of more traditionally theoretical at the university level? Traditionally, the main objective was to accumulate the biggest amount of theoretical knowledge as the basis to familiarize with literary works and apply this to teaching and research, whereas nowadays the tendency is to work in improving three different sets of “competences”: knowledge, skills and attitudes and working towards the subject mastery, the learning process and the general and specific practice in the professional area.
In this paper, we will focus on the optional subject Short Story USA (5 credits ECTS), with a duration of 15 weeks (four months) and taught within the Grade of Estudis Anglesos (previously Filología Inglesa). We will start with the subject information which includes the objectives & competences developed in the course, the workload, the syllabus –contents and methodology--, the “Temporal Planning” (theory/practice), the different materials and resources needed (readings, bibliography, methodology, assessment) and, finally, the evaluation strategies. In the section where we talk about the diverse competences to develop in this course, we will make a stop in the Oral Presentations which we consider important for the improvement of the technical competences as well as essential for students’ personal and social development.