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.  

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.