Evaluation

Evaluation must be done following criteria of learning and improving, which require a permanent actualization of knowledge, for both students and teachers. In this respect, evaluation is a continuous process that seeks to understand the state of the educational processes and, starting from these, to identify the weaknesses and plan strategies of improvement. Thus, it is necessary to make pedagogical interventions that coordinate students and critical writers, which permit a communicative, comprehensive, critical relation. This way, students learn to learn how to evaluate themselves, so, once again, social cognitive and metacognitive strategies gain importance.

Actually, in evaluation the most important is the declarative knowledge (information about the world, the language, etc.) and procedural knowledge related to reading and writing, excluding the order of states and actions, i.e., of knowing about and knowing how, which is strategically applied in pedagogical interventions. These include in particular the social and cognitive strategies that make a person. These include the social and cognitive strategies that a person needs to perform a determined task.

In conclusion, learning to read and write is part of the communicative skills, while all skills are products of the coordination of multiple knowledge. Therefore, evaluation must exclusively address the competencies and should specify the evolution of the student in developing them.

Communicative skills and the evaluation of the reading and writing processes

For Gumperz and Hymes (1982:209), from the point of view of interaction, communicative skills can be defined as: “knowledge of linguistic and communicative conventions in general, that speakers must possess in order to create and maintain a conversational cooperation.” Saville Troike (1989, 1982:21) states that: “Communication skills imply knowledge not only about the linguistic code, but also about what and how to relay a message in an appropriate manner, whatever the given situation. This relates to the social and cultural knowledge of the speakers, which allows them to use and interpret the linguistic forms.

In Colombia, researchers like María Cristina Torrado, Guillermo Bustamante, Sergio Tobón and Eduardo Serrano have studied the concept of skill. From this pint of view, the context and the situation in which the competence develops constitute the dialogical unity that puts knowing above being, knowing how to do and being able to do it, which is the ultimate goal of the comprehensive social education at the University.

Vygotsky’s theory

Vygotsky’s theory proves highly relevant for education in general, and for the processes of reading and writing in particular. To the same extent are relevant the contemporary theoretical and methodological approaches about teaching writing, formulated by researchers like Anna Camps, Teresa Colomer, Daniel Cassany, Isabel Solé, Gladys Stella López, Delia Lerner, María Teresa Serafini, Josette Jolibert, Luis Ángel Baena, Gloria Rincón, María Cristina Martínez, Fabio Jurado, Mauricio Pérez Abril and others.

The authors mentioned above all formulated the same basic criteria for the teaching of writing and reading:

• Types of discourses should be approached according to the students’ necessities.
• In order to learn how to write, it is essential that students have access in the classroom to model texts that will serve as references for their own works.
• After focusing on the text as a product, it is necessary to perceive the production of texts as a process, so the teacher has the duty to allow time for planning, textualization and revision, and offer support in each of these stages.
• Learning about the processes of reading and writing implies a permanent process of metacognition.
• It is necessary to acknowledge the “teachability” of the processes of reading and writing, as these don’t appear spontaneously, nor in time, as we age, nor as we pass from one school year to another.
• It is essential to insist on the necessity to make pedagogical interventions meant to improve the complex processes of constructing the meaning, developing different types of strategies (cognitive, metacognitive, ludic, etc.) that stimulate the development of communicative skills.

Therefore, we must say that the teaching strategies, as defined by Mayer (cited by Díaz, 1999) are “the procedures of resources used by the agent of teaching in order to promote significant learning,” while learning strategies are defined as “a series of helpers inside the student; these decide when and why to apply them, to learn, remember and use the information.”

Skills to interpret academic texts

It is a common fact that students take part in various social activities of reading and writing that require their familiarization with different types of discourses. Thus, given the conditions presented in this proposal, we must highlight the focus on the development of competencies that will allow students to interpret academic texts and produce different types of discourses, characteristic for the academic university education, such as: the summary, the review, the essay, analysis, report, protocol, record, statement and cover letters, etc.

Teaching and learning of reading and writing

Nowadays, a subject is seen as an active and constructive agent of their own knowledge, due to the contributions brought by different disciplines to language sciences, pedagogy and didactics, which have made room for new and diverse tendencies. From the advent of the socio-constructivist direction, these tendencies have offered points of reference and explanation of the processes of teaching and learning, which put forth modern pedagogical and didactic alternatives that come to face the requirements and changes that the contemporary society demands from its professionals and from education in general.

According to Coll (1995:508), the socio-constructivist conception of teaching and writing starts from the obvious fact that school presents students the aspects of culture that are fundamental for their personal development, beyond the cognitive environment; education is the engine of development in a global meaning, which also implies the abilities of personal equilibrium, social insertion and inter-personal relations.

This is how the explanatory referential marker allows the integration of apparently different positions, such as those of Piaget, Vygotsky, Ausubel and others, as none of them opposes the access to culture and individual development. On the contrary, they understand that the development of a person depends on the cultural background in which he is immersed, and, therefore, it is built, but it also learns (and it is taught) how to build itself. Culture is perceived now as a semiotic process of interpretation and construction of signs, as  Clifford Geertz states.

A new culture of learning

The training requirements for the modern professional are generated by a new culture of learning that is not exclusive to the environment of the formal educational system. Students encounter different sources of information that can sometimes cause fragmentation and distortion. At university, they need mechanisms and strategies that will allow them to organize, interpret and give meaning to the information, so that it will convert into an important element in the acquirement and production of knowledge.

Reading and writing as intellectual practices must be encouraged by university professors, who will legitimize the reading and writing processes in their students. If the university community claims to work for the construction of knowledge, they will admit the importance of reading and writing as social and discursive practices that affect the acquisition and retention of knowledge, as well as their implications. Therefore, they will also admit that the student faces characteristic types of discourses when going to university, so it is the obligation of the institution to ensure the necessary conditions for the student to approach this type of genres.

Types of discourse, according to Bajtín (1997), are relatively stable types of statements, specific for each area of language usage. The richness and diversity of genres is huge, since the possibilities of human activity are countless and because in practice there is a wide range of discursive genres that becomes more broad and that increases as it develops. At the same time, some of them tend to disappear, while others are born as a result of human activity.  

Editing your work

There is so much work that it goes beyond just adding or deleting some commas. You have to rewrite it.

You don’t understand why this is happening. Isn't writing easy? Reading is pretty easy; you just glide over the text. Why should writing be any different? I mean, you speak your language perfectly, and it shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Hundreds of questions are going through your head, and they get mixed with unkind feelings towards the editor. But, your work must go on and you have to find a way to do it. Demoralization should be left behind. How to do it?

Next time you’re in this situation, put yourself in the editor’s shoes and remember these things.

1.       Your text was only edited, no one is judging you. This is not school, and you’re not being graded. No one is interested in grading you, they only care about your text, and how it can get to be the best it can be for your readers.

2.      Direct comments are not rude. The editor is trying to be nice, but he can’t write a speech in each comment. The more direct the comment is, the better. This doesn’t mean the editor is being rude, it just means that he doesn’t want to waste your time, and he wants to make the reviewing process less exhausting.

3.       Know how to distinguish between rules, improvements and suggestions. The editor knows that some of the observations he makes should be followed to set your text in accordance with clear and unquestionable linguistic rules. There are other observations that are just improvements (what you wrote was correct, but this improves, clarifies or preserves the meaning better), and others are just suggestions (what you wrote is correct, but you would benefit from writing this or that). You won’t always agree, and sometimes you’ll have better solutions. Think about the comments, analyze them to see if there’s a better solution and negotiate.

4.       You shouldn’t get into a power struggle. The editor is not interested in becoming a dictator who must be obeyed at all times. The editor wants to help you improve your text, be it via the solution he suggests or with alternatives that deal with the issue raised in the comment.

5.       The editor is the specialist, not you. We tend to think that speaking our language is a universal skill, and that it grants us the authority to express ourselves without being corrected at all. This is false. You need to study to earn a degree in medicine, engineering or architecture, and you recognize these fields as specialties because of their competencies and particular knowledge. In that same way, you need to study your language, and you need to learn to use it as a malleable thing so that you can communicate... The editor is an expert in his field. Let him apply his knowledge and experience freely.

Reading and writing at university

Perceiving university as a place where students not only work with knowledge, but also have to transform it, it is important to consider the role of reading and writing in the achievement of this goal. In this respect, there are enough conclusions which show that students go to university without having managed, during elementary and secondary school, to develop discursive strategies that would allow them to dominate texts in general, not mentioning academic texts. This justifies the formulation of curricular proposals in which are taken into account variants (not only disciplinary, but especially epistemological, cognitional and cultural ones) that would ensure the acquirement of the processes of reading and writing, as a way to access knowledge and particularly as an essential fundament of the national and cultural identity.

Of course, we cannot deny that the forms and conditions of teaching reading and writing during previous levels of education can be inappropriate, but there is another aspect that we want to highlight: the fact that the ability of university students to read and write is strongly related to the forms of access to culture and its circulation, by the means of different traditional or technological and communicational supports and resources, and also to the difficulty in producing certain types of texts, specific for the university academic activity. Britto (1988) says on this topic: “we don’t mean to say that university students can’t read or write, but rather that they don’t use a certain form of discourse – academic discourse -, through which the university identifies itself and is identified by others.”

The university, being aware of this situation and understanding this skill as part of students’ university education, considers that it has to facilitate the interaction of the students with the practice of language characteristic for their field of study, with a specialized investigative activity and with the communication of the information inherent to their professional area, so that the student will get integrated in a certain academic community.

What is a text?

A text is a communicative and discursive event, as the unity of discourse stands in the elements that are organized and inter-connected, in an explicit or implicit way. This organization and inter-relationships forms the structure of the discourse, which in turn creates its object: the text. Thus, textualization is the process of expressing in words – in either spoken or written form – the mental contents manifested through organized thought, in which the text is displayed spatially and temporally, in sequences of phrases arranged in a relation of continuity.

On the subject of textual linguistics, Beaugrande and Dressler (1997), cited by  Ordóñez (2006:25-26) claim that: “a text is not a great amount of words, or a super-long sentence consisting of logical, well-arranged utterances, nor is it a set of grammar rules. What really makes a text is its communicative significance, for which it must fulfill seven inter-related textual norms – two of them are inherent to the text (cohesion and coherence), while five others are related to context (intentionality, acceptability, informativeness, situation and intertextuality) – and three regulatory principles of communication (efficacy, effectiveness and appropriateness).

A new direction and approach

A new direction and approach on reading and writing is to do it in large groups. This shows a processes and practices have the purpose to make it possible for the reader and writer to colonize their culture intellectually and develop in themselves the ability to see  knowledge as fields that can be reconfigured and which require a flexible subject, able to assimilate the permanently changing structures. Consequently, we can say that reading and writing have become, in the contemporaneous world, a task that requires more liberty, more competence, because the world and, implicitly, knowledge, are less linear, but wider and more intricate.

The fields of reading and writing have been extended, so that now we can read texts related to different areas – these are discourses, understood as texts about everything around us that makes sense and can be communicated in various ways. The discourse is a paradigm of significates with which we build, name and perceive the material and spiritual world. On the other hand, Casamiglia and Tusón (1999) state that talking about discourse means, above all things, talking about a social practice that starts from a contextualized use of language, either oral or written. Therefore, the discourse is part of the social life and sometimes is in itself an instrument that creates social life.

Van Dijk (1996) tries to explain the concept, identifying the three main dimensions of the discourse: the use of language, the communication of beliefs (cognition) and the interaction of social characters. Basically, one could say that a discourse is language at work. It is an individual, but also a social process. Discourse doesn’t appear only when somebody speaks or writes, but there is a discourse in all human activities. There is a discourse before the first word is uttered. Discourse is not just an instrument of language, but it is also a generator of knowledge and of meaning. The text is a concrete form of discourse, or we can say that a discourse is a text put in context.

Modern reading and writing

In the socio-historical context of the modern age, different theoretical and methodological concepts about reading and writing have been formulated, as well as various social, technological and academic uses. Nowadays, as Ferreiro (2005:13) states: “Reading and writing don’t have a unique definition, but they are verbs that refer to social structures, to activities defined from a social point of view.” The relationship of men and women with writing hasn’t always been the same: it was built throughout history. Reading didn’t and won’t have the same meaning in the 12th and the 21st century. We are witnessing the apparition of new ways of reading and new methods of writing, born from the new points of view, from hermeneutical perspectives, whose intentions are to explore texts and discourses.

In respect to these ideas, UNESCO and CEPAL state that “Cultural codes of modernity are usually defined as the skills required by the modern citizen for handling arithmetic, as well as reading and comprehension of written text; written communication; observation, description and critical analysis of the environment; receiving and interpreting messages of modern media; and participation in the design and implementation of group work.” (Cerro Robles, 1995)

The effort to practice the processes of reading and writing of texts and discourses helps expand and enhance the area of work, approaching these processes from a social, cognitive, discursive and interactive perspective, which requires understanding that discourses are, more than anything, social practices that cross with dialectical relations between particular discursive events, situations of communication in given contexts, powerful social actors and structures. 

Writing and reading approach

Bereiter and Scardamalia (1992) (cited by Hurtado and others, 2005) match a great writing and reading approach and identify two models of composition: on the one hand, reproducing the knowledge, and on the other hand, transforming the knowledge. In the second model, the authors consider that the writer starts from some previous mental representations, constructed in the moment when he takes up the task of writing, sets his objectives, organizes a writing plan and reflects on its development. Also, this model of writing is perceived from the point of view of problem solving, since at the time he produces the text, the writer must make certain decisions in regard to two aspects that offer multiple options: one of these is content, which refers to “what”, and the other is rhetoric, which refers to “how”.

The Spanish Minister of National Education (1998) also mentions the double condition of writing, as a process both individual and social: “This is not only about the coding of the significates by the means of linguistic rules. It is about a process that can be individual or social, through which a whole world is created, and in which are involved abilities, knowledge, interests. Sometimes, this process can be defining for a sociocultural and pragmatic context that determines the act of writing: writing means creating the world.”

Reading is not a neutral act

 Umberto Eco (in The Role of the Reader, 1979) states that “reading is not a neutral act; there is a series of complex relations and unique strategies that form between the reader and the text, which often modify to a significant extent the intrinsic meaning of the original text.” Similarly, Jorje Larrosa (2003:207) claims that: “…when reading, it is not that important what we think of the text, but what we think about ourselves starting from, or through the lenses of the text. If it doesn’t happen this way, then the reading is not actually happening.”

In regard to writing, Larrosa (2003:53) also states that: “ we can write only by repeating and transforming what we have read, so to write (and to read) is like diving in an abyss in which we believe we can find wonderful things. But when we return to the surface, all we have are common rocks, pieces of broken glass and something like a new anxiety in our eyes. The written (and read) text is only the visible and always disappointing trace of an adventure that, in the end, has proved impossible. And yet, we have become transformed. Writing means scratching, replacing, deleting... ".

In this respect, Anna Camps, Cassany and other researchers (Hayes and Flower, 1980; Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1987, etc.) have shown that writing is a complex activity through which the writer performs different, inter-related actions, at various levels. Probably the most widespread model is that of Hayes and Flower (1980), (1981) who see composition as an activity coordinated by the effort to achieve rhetorical goals, in which three basic processes take place: planning, textualization and revision.

On the other hand, it is relevant to highlight the essential role of writing in the construction of knowledge, especially at university level. According to Wells (2001) (cited by Vargas, 2007), the production of a written text is a powerful method of getting to understand the topic about which one is writing, considering that apart from communicating the things one understands, writing is a process through which the writer manages to understand new aspects.

The concepts of reading and writing

In this article, reading and writing are seen as two distinct, but related processes in the construction of meaning. We must note that, actually, the traditional, reductionist approach through which reading and writing used to be studied, falls into a distinct theoretical position than the one we are using here. In this model, we consider these two processes as simple coding and decoding activities, unrelated to the topic of conversation.

In this respect, the concept of reading has changed dramatically: previously, it was considered a serial pattern (ascending or descending), while now it is seen as an “interactive process”. From this point of view, reading is perceived as (Grabe, 1997) “a process that requires the reader to activate his abilities and knowledge, in order to interpret a text; through this process, textual structures and previous knowledge activate in the memory and coordinate the construction of meaning.” From an interactive perspective, for example, the reader should be able to turn back and clarify something that he doesn’t understand – an idea or a word – and he is also able to anticipate or make predictions about the text.

On the other hand, it is essential to take into account the fact that the relation between the topic and the text appears in the network of social interactions, which implies the interpretation and production of different text genres, each having specific purposes.

The Theoretical Framework of Reading and Writing

University students are faced with different activities involving the reading and writing of discourses, absolutely necessary for the development of their academic work. These tasks require the students to expand, enhance, check, reformulate and gather new interdisciplinary knowledge, essential for their comprehensive education. The new university practices related to discourse and social communication often raise concerns and, in some cases, even frustration. Therefore, it is necessary to develop efficient strategies for the creation and production of texts that will allow students to respond to these new learning situations.

This theoretical framework in the training of reading and writing is based on disciplinary contributions resulted from the investigation in disciplines like linguistics, semiotics, pedagogy, psychology, and other fields of study of the processes of reading and writing. This paper offers university students a pedagogical alternative that will help them face a new academic reality that most of them are not familiar with – especially considering the variety of discourse types embodied in the language and particular conventions of each field of study.

From a theoretical point of view, this aspect is part of a perspective that connects pedagogy with language sciences. As for pedagogy, its fundaments are comprised in the socio-cognitive-constructivist model, formulated by authors like Vygotsky ad Ausubel. On the other hand, in regard to language sciences, we need to mention that the theory that guides this component highlights the socio-cognitive-discursive and interactive approach.