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.”