Abstract:

We all assume that nowadays there is a tendency toward working in the improvement of three different sets of “competences”: knowledge, skills and attitudes; that is, working towards the subject mastery, the learning process and the general and specific practice in the professional area.

After tackling in a previous article some key questions such as to what extent we should teach our students what our global competitive society demands or whether 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, we now want to follow up with a review of our experience with oral presentations as the means to improve one of these technical and social competences.

In this paper, we will focus on the Oral Presentation as an essential competence to be developed in the optional subject Monographic of US Literature (6 credits ECTS), with a duration of 15 weeks (four months) and taught within the Grade of English Studies. We will resume from our previous article on the Oral Presentation by summarizing some important points including the objectives & competences developed in the course, the workload, the syllabus –contents and methodology--, the “Temporal Planning” (theory/practice) and, finally, the evaluation strategies. Then we will show the results of our experience with our students regarding the Oral Presentation which we consider relevant for the improvement of the technical competences of our Grade as well as for students’ personal and social development.