Communicative competence development in engineering studies

Abstract

Political, economical, social, and cultural transformations of Lithuanian life put forward new challenges and requirements for communication in general. This transformation based process explicitly aims at the formation of democratic community while cherishing the personal individuality of every citizen, supporting him/her with the right to choose political, moral, economical systems. Such social context lays a stress on effective oral verbal communication [1]. For this reason the research paper aims to clarify the importance of communicative competence while educating future intelligent person. The main objectives of the research paper are: 1) to discuss the concepts of information, knowledge and learning societies; 2) to define the conceptual essence of communicative competence; 3) to present the research methodology; 4) to interpret the received research data. The research was performed in the quantitative research paradigm. The main research methods were scientific literature analysis, quantitative analysis of the questionnaires. The research was performed in spring of 2008 ies. The sample of the research (n=211) is 211 students of Kaunas University of Technology. The respondents study social sciences, informatics, and export engineering. The researchers tried to investigate students' theoretical and practical ability to communicate with different partners. The questionnaire positions asked about students' attitudes towards their abilities to communicate with job and study partners. The researchers tried to diagnose respondents' abilities to communicate orally and in written form, to speak in public, to apply non-verbal communication. The attempt was made to reveal the factors that influence the development of students' communicative competence in native and foreign languages. [...]