Communicative competence in higher education: towards a comprehensive diagnostic evaluation

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to diagnose the sufficiency of first-year pedagogy students’ discoursive competence, considering lexical, reading comprehension and written competences. Whit this objective, three instruments were designed and adapted, one for each competence: lexical availability test, reading comprehension test and rubric to evaluate an argumentative writing task. Among the main findings, it stands out that the highest performance corresponds to performance in reading, over writing and lexicon, respectively. It is concluded that the obtained results allow classifying the performances in initial levels and that, although it is not possible to speak of the existence of a correlation, the closest links are between reading-writing, lexicon-writing and lexicon-reading, respectively.