INFLUENCES OF ADVERTISING ON THE COMMUNICATIONAL COMPETENCE OF ENGINEERING STUDENTS

The communicational competence is an integrated and quantifiable system of acquired knowledge, abilities and attitudes that facilitate the accomplishment of a communicational task, in the professional or personal environment. From a pedagogical perspective, this means that not only teaching should deal with the development of a proper attitude towards communication, but this attitude should also be properly evaluated. The traditional forms of evaluation, irrespective of their marking system, fail to evaluate the most important aspect of communication the attitude that the text or oral message conveys towards its recipients. The paper presents the results of a communicational experiment conducted on a group of 75 engineering students who were asked to write a business letter to win over a potential client. In the absence of proper training in business practices, the students tried to find alternative solutions by using elements from the advertisements found in the real estate business environment at hand. The qualitative analysis of their responses shows that such an influence can produce improper learning outcomes.