EDUCATION-LATIN AMERICA: New Experts in Reading and Writing Skills

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Dec 3 2000 (IPS) - High school teachers throughout Latin America have long observed with resignation the difficulties their students face in the area of writing and comprehension skills. But educators trained to tackle such problems will complete a new graduate programme this year in Argentina, Chile and Colombia.

The first set of graduate students specifically trained in pedagogical techniques involving instruction in reading and writing skills will receive their degrees this year in a new programme set up under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in the public universities of Buenos Aires, Del Valle (in Colombia) and Valparaíso (in Chile).

Strategies focusing on improving reading and writing skills help students learn how to think, which in turn boosts their overall academic performance, said the director of the UNESCO chair, Maria Cristina Martínez, who is also head of the master’s programme at Colombia’s Del Valle University.

Martínez took part in a colloquium held last month in Buenos Aires, which drew together the heads of the UNESCO programme from the three universities, educators and researchers in literature and linguistics, and the graduate students finishing their degrees.

The new graduate programme provides educators with the tools for instructing students in the techniques for writing essays or reports, rather than simply expecting them to know how to do so.

English-speaking countries have a long tradition of teaching composition and writing skills, with specific courses, for example, in “creative writing” and “expository writing”, psycholinguist Maria Teresa Serafini points out in her book “Cómo redactar un tema” (“How to Write on an Issue”), which forms part of the bibliography of the UNESCO graduate programme.

According to Serafini, in comparison to English-language curricula, the teaching of writing skills in Spanish is not as well developed.

To illustrate the truth of that assertion, high school literature teacher Liliana Martínez told IPS that a phrase frequently heard by students when they are instructed to write an essay or report is “So what do I put?”

Up to now, the idea in Argentina and other countries in the region was that getting students to read was enough, and that they would naturally comprehend what they were reading and incorporate correct spelling and other aspects of good writing.

High school students are generally assigned a theme to write on – with no additional instructions – and then they sit down to chew on their pencils as they wait for the inspiration to hit them. Another phenomenon that is all too frequent, according to the experts, is plagiarism.

A study carried out by Argentina’s Education Ministry found that 77 percent of high school graduates had difficulties comprehending what they were reading and arguing a point – two skills acquired when reading and writing are specific subjects that are taught, the participants pointed out.

“We don’t teach them how to make an outline and rough draft of what they are going to write, or how to build a hypothesis,” said Martínez. “We lead them to believe that writing is a job that is learned in one fell swoop, and that it is only for the gifted, and we often give a passing grade to works that we know were copied directly from books.”

Part of the problem has to do with the fact that literature teachers are the ones put in charge of teaching students to write, while it is one thing to write fiction and a very different thing to learn the techniques for expressing ideas correctly in writing, independently of one’s creative talent, she underlined.

The director of the programme in Argentina, Elvira Narvaja, told IPS that the graduate students in the new programme were prepared to advise schools in designing curricula at all grade levels, in order to give the project coherence.

They are also trained in the preparation of textbooks, the coordination of the work of teachers, and the organisation of workshops on writing and reading skills, seen as part of the same process.

The programme’s graduates will be prepared to hold workshops on composition at the tertiary level to help advanced students reflect on what they write, avoid falling into the commonplace, and substantiate and refute arguments.

Linguist Berta Zamudio, director of the reading and writing workshop in the department of semiology of the University of Buenos Aires, said at the colloquium that students who reflected on what they were going to write even before they started doing their research were better able to argue their point.