Communicative competence, learning and disciplinary insertion in the Foreign Languages Pedagogical Career

Abstract

Objective: The paper is focused on the process of students’ insertion into disciplines in the context of the foreign language pedagogical career at “Ignacio Agramonte” University. It covers a descriptive-reflective study about the necessity of a didactic planning of specialized disciplines, oriented to the development of the communicative competence from discipline discourses in academic and professional fields, and its implications for students’ learning of foreign languages.

Methods: The method of documentary analysis was used to study the syllabus of specialized disciplines of the Foreign Languages Pedagogical career, concerning discipline projection and professional logic. The theoretical systematization was used to cope with discourse perspective of disciplines and the development of the communicative competence with specific academic and professional purposes.

Result: The theoretical nature of the results obtained allowed orienting the teachers’ actions for a coherent didactic planning of disciplines towards academic and professional orientations. With this purpose some methodological guidelines to direct discipline methodologies were designed.

Conclusion: A disciplinary insertion in Foreign Languages Pedagogical career begins with an appropriation of a discipline culture that shares not only social practices, conventions, and ways of thinking, that shares and negotiates meanings, develops comprehension and production processes, but also that makes possible to solve problems within the disciplines as sciences, linked with problems inherent in the profession. This insertion requires an explicit didactic planning that integrates disciplinary content and language into a ‘form-content’ dialectic interrelation, so that it shows a progress in the process of understanding of the conceptual and linguistic dimensions of the discipline. It requires also to deepen the dynamic of the relationship between objectivescontents-methods and procedures- organization-evaluation that responds to a particular dynamic of disciplinary culture, in which discourses, rhetoric structures, social, cognitive and affective aspects are functionally interwoven. This leads to certain changes in the didacticmethodological and scientific conception of the career and disciplines, oriented to a coherent and  progressive disciplinary insertion.