Reading and writing skills in higher education

Results and Conclusions

According to the majority of the lecturers, the students have an intermediate level of competence in both activities although they seem to have a better performance in Writing than in Reading/Comprehension. However, the students in their questionnaire consider that they have an intermediate level of competence in both skills but that they have a slightly better performance in Reading/ Comprehension than in Writing.

In fact, this contrast between the perceptions of the lecturers and the students came somehow to confirm the idea presented in a study conducted by Lea and Street (1998) in which the authors assorted that one of the reasons why students have, for example, problems in writing is that their expectations of writing differ from that of their lecturers.

Data also allowed us to conclude that, according to the lecturers, the students main difficulties in Reading are associated with the comprehension of questions, data, demonstrations (81.3%), vocabulary (8.5%), with Reading-aloud (4,2%), with the understanding of the connections between ideas (2.1%) and in understanding abstract concepts (2.1%).

Also according to the lecturers, the students’ difficulties in writing are connected with: orthography (46.4%), sentence building and articulation of ideas (19.8%), grammar rules (5.1%), punctuation (5.1%), coherence (4.3%), syntax (4.3%), synthesizing (4.3%), vocabulary (3.4%), concord (3.4%), Scientific discourse (5%), speech clearness (1.6%) and structure (1.6%).

The findings associated with the value attributed by lecturers to their students writing correctness in reports/papers/exams show us that 41% of the subjects reveal that they give no importance to the way students write, 25% attribute approximately 10% of the final mark to the writing performance of the student, 14%

attribute 20%, 4% around 30%, 1% around 40% and 8% 50 or even 60%.

When asked about if they performed any strategies to help their students with their assignments through feedback instructions or direct instruction to promote their proficiency in this field, 47% answered that they developed such type of strategies and 52% that they did not. The types of strategies developed are mainly associated with feedback in orthography/ spelling and grammar (41.1%) (42,8% of which with direct- “face-to face” feedback (correction meetings), supply of “how to write ”bibliography at the beginning of the semester (5.8%), presentation of task outlines and limited answer space (5.8%), written answer justification in exams and reports (5.8%), organization of class summaries/outlines for the students (5.8%), asking students to rewrite and correct written works (2.9%), decrease the use of multiple-choice exams (2.9%), sentence structure and meaning analysis with the students during class (2.9%) and creation of personal lab reports and notebooks/portfolios (2.9%). In fact, Bailey and Vardi (1999) argued that feedback on assignments is one of the major tools that markers can use to improve students’ ability. However, our data indicate that this feedback to students on their writing is not a widespread and institutionalised procedure in the analysed reality. This way, there seems to exist a correspondence between the strategies developed by the lecturers to help their students to overcome their writing problems and the diagnosed needs of their students in this field. This effort towards academic expertise demands not only the lecturers’ commitment as subject experts but also their involvement as learning mediators, namely by developing three kinds of expertise that according to Chanock (1995), are needed to help students improve their academic writing: expertise in discipline, expertise in language and an understanding of how the discipline interacts with language.