Orality as a communicative competence in interaction scenarios among university students

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and physical distancing profoundly altered everyday communication dynamics. This research aimed to establish the importance of developing oral communication skills as a communicative competence in university students' interaction settings. A descriptive and exploratory qualitative methodology was used. Definitions from Conversation Analysis and acoustic-prosodic analysis were combined with the use of Praat software and ToBi notation for transcribing ten-minute telephone conversations. The recordings were presented in a structured manner, using enumerations that indicated the conversational entries of the speakers. This allowed for the identification of turn-taking, intonation, pause markers, and the presence of elongations, as overlapping speech contributes to effective and fluent communication. The study concludes that its findings contribute to media literacy by developing oral communication skills in interaction settings. This study promotes oral communication, as it encourages active listening, communicative competence, courtesy, and media literacy to strengthen the dynamics of conversation analysis.