It is pertinent to note, that this
inquiry for the significance of reading and writing in the universities led the
“National Conference on Institutional Policies for the Development of Reading
and Writing in Higher Education”; they also concluded that reading
and writing should be commitments backed up by precise and explicit
institutional policies; that the meaning building processes have an essential
role in the social and professional life of the productive sector of a country,
and they also emphasized on the need for looking into new trends and
theoretical approaches that are underlying the educational and curricular
proposals on reading and writing on the Higher Education of the country.
These initiatives, in addition to the
multiple dissertations and Master and PhD thesis, like the research conducted
in the University in a study called “Teaching how to understand texts in the
university”, invite us to recognize reading and writing as a process of discovery, inquiry, discussion, explanation; actions that
are characteristic of research, understood as a social activity that leads to
the production of knowledge. This way, research, assessment and the results,
among them, the ones originated from the Quality Assessment on Higher
Education, have put into evidence the existence of issues related to reading
and writing that is necessary to expose and intervene.
Finally, it is worth noticing the impact
that the educational and teaching national proposals on reading and writing
have had. Within these, the ones proposed by the Research Group on Reading and
Writing, the Linguistics, Spanish and Literature Departments and the programs of
the bachelor’s degrees in Ethno-education, Primary school education with a
focus on Spanish and English, Speech Therapy, among others, which, from many years, have not only explored and promoted the research
on this field, but have also achieve that the students transform their
practices of reading and writing and recognize these processes as needs of the
contemporary human being. The results are shown in the number of academic
programs that have incorporated to their curricular structure the subject of reading
and writing, in some cases, many levels or classes; on the dissertations that
have made on the topic students from programs related to Language Studies, in
various university publications, in the existence of a Specialization program in
the Pedagogy of the reading and writing, and on the results of the reading and writing tests,
among others.
