Proposal to develop social competences through cooperative learning in English as a foreign language classes

Abstract

Higher education needs to include the acquisition of different types of competences apart from teaching contents. This article presents some cooperative activities that contribute to the acquisition of social competences such as communication and cooperation in order to highlight the integral education of students and to accomplish the demands of the labour market. The main objectives of this article are the following: to use multimodal texts on social topics and to organise debates to work on social competences in a cooperative methodology; to highlight the importance of education based on emotional competences in general and on social competences in particular for lecturers and students to observe how they modify the power relationships in the classroom. In order to accomplish the objectives, the article offers examples of activities that are framed in an active methodology in which students and lecturers share the responsibility. In this sense, this article explores how the cooperative methodology proposed implies changes in the roles of teachers and students. It is also highlighted the importance of lecturers being emotionally competent.