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.