The written language of students from UDELAS

description, analysis and proposal for improvement

Abstract

Most of the countries that form the Hispanic World has manifested publically worry for the results obtained in the teaching of the mother tongue. This situation turns particularly serious when the problems are perceived to be revealed in the university classrooms. The UDELAS university students have deficiencies in reading comprehension, bad quality in writing and in oral speech. All this is motivated by low indices in lexical richness and syntactic maturity, the use of infant cohesive schemes, and frequents breaks of textual coherence, among other linguistic factors. The purpose of this investigation is not other than to describe, analyses and arrive to offer concrete and true solutions to this basic problem, from a scientific perspective. That has been possible thanks to techniques of data collection consisting in the application of an instrument of measurement: construction of texts to evaluate the written production of the students. They allowed to measure the indices of lexical richness, syntactic maturity, lexical cohesion, and discourse coherence. The result obtained is a characterization of the indices of the students’ written expression that may be useful for the design of pedagogical interventions for the improvement of the ability. In all variables the levels of Low and Middle are higher than 70%, and the development of the written expression skill is graded as Bad. Therefore, the conclusion is that de written expression development is insufficient in the first admission students of the Specialized University of Americas.