Reading at the Beginning of University. Practices and Representations in Students and Educators

Abstract

Reading, conceived as a social and cultural practice, shapes specific ways of reading and specific tasks for readers. Reading practices at the Higher Education Level are essentially different from those of secondary school. Students notice in this transition from one level to another, new modes of reading and construct, based on their experiences, representations about what a text is and what it means to be a reader. For their part, teachers implement didactic interventions that seek to foster the comprehension process, based on the representations of reading and the ways of reading. This article presents an in-depth analysis of the discourses revealed through different research instruments: interviews, focus groups and discussions with secondary and higher education teachers and university students within the teaching degree programs of the Faculty of Education Sciences and Psychology at the National University of Comahue. In the institutional dynamics that regulate and validate interpretations of academic texts, we can point out some core issues regarding practices and representations about reading: first, the contradiction between the discourse on reading and its concrete practices that strain these representations linked to the construction of meaning and the deciphering of a meaning immanent to the text; second, the role of orality in contrast to the hegemony of writing; and finally, the constitution of reading communities as an alternative to solitary reading practices.