Abstract:

In the European Higher Education Area developing learners' competence is an important part of the mission of higher education. To develop an innovative training framework that will improve teachers’ awareness of key competences and professional skills. The acquisition of both types of skills allows to contribute to the development of creativity, adaptation to the rapidly changing circumstances, intercultural and multilingual competences, social development, and an improved perception of one’s own capacity to solve problems.

Some of those key competences are communication in the mother tongue, communication in foreign languages, working in groups, or capacity for effective problem solving among others.

Competence in linguistic communication presupposes the use of language as a means of oral and written communication, which refers to a language user's grammatical knowledge, and the like, as well as social knowledge about how and when to use utterances appropriately. Also involves the use of at least one foreign language, in this case the English language.
In this sense, the aim of this work is to evaluate the competence in linguistic communication in students of Food Science and Technology and design a strategic approach in improving students' competences.

A system for evaluating the competences through a rubric has been developed, and the focus group for implementation have been students of various degree’s courses that have developed such competence in the realization of written exams and reports and oral presentations on some of the subjects studied in these degrees. Then, the analysis of the results has been carried out, and improvement strategies were proposed to be put into practice.

Therefore, this study is a first step of a more ambitious project involving the development of actions for improvement the implementation of key competences in the degree’s students.

Keywords:

Transversal key competences, communication skills, Food Science and Technology degree.