Design, implementation and assessment of an academic literacy intervention proposal in first-year of the elementary education program at UC, Villarrica campus

Abstract

The present study reports a piece of research aimed at improving text comprehension and production in first-year students from the Elementary Education Teacher program (PGB) at the Villarrica campus of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC). The action research model was applied to approach the university context through workshops including teachers and students from the first year.From a cognitive-constructivist perspective, text comprehension is understood as a dynamic process involving construction of coherent representations and inferences at multiple text and context levels, within a limited work-ing memory capacity. Strategy building is also described, which is later considered for the implementation of the intervention plan.Text production is considered from a constructive approach, which proposes the representation of mental constructs in a written text through the plan-ning, translation, writing and revision processes, adapted to a scholarly communication context. The concept of academic literacy is taken from Carlino (2005:13) and refers to the “set of concepts and strategies needed to participate in the discursive culture of disciplines...”. Some text type notions are also reviewed, particularly regarding the argumentative text, whose command is an important requirement in higher education today.The methodology corresponds to an action research model, based on thematic workshops and activities that were implemented with first-year students; also, regular workshops on the development and evaluation of reading comprehension and text production for first-year teachers were conducted.For the assessment of text comprehension and production, instruments available at the Chilean educational system, specifically the Comprehensive Assessment of Reading Strategies, published by Curriculum, was used to diagnose comprehension, whereas the Written Communication Test from UC was utilized to assess text production.