Measurement of social capital in higher education an alternative to the dilemma of development

Oral communication or speech represents for any human being its essential (not unique) mode of socio-cultural interaction. With the establishment of orality in the Colombian judicial process, it is necessary for professionals in law to improve their oral communicative skills. The objective of this research was to identify the characteristics of the speech process in the aspects of voice, diction, fluency and prosody of the student-researchers in the Law Program of the Santiago de Cali University. A cross-sectional descriptive study was carried out, selecting a non-probabilistic sample of 38 people. Univariate and bivariate analysis were performed. It was evidenced that although the speech present in the study population was functional for some everyday contexts, there were found speech difficulties, such as disfluency in 63.16% of cases, and dysprosody in over 50% of the population, among other findings. This influences the discursive dynamics of procedural orality, which is an essential tool for the jurisdictional task of professionals in law.