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.