Reading comprehension and writing in university students

Abstract

In this article we present some considerations about the difficulties that university students have in two fundamental aspects such as reading comprehension and writing, that is, the mastery of the written code. In a research study conducted with students of the Spanish Language Workshop at the Faculty of Humanities and Education of the University of Zulia, we found that these difficulties are closely related. In order to have evidence of the existence of these difficulties, we applied an instrument through which students demonstrated the degree of skill they have in reading and writing. Through this research we detected a series of lexical incoherences, among which three types stand out: phraseological incoherence in terms of syntactic order, lexical incoherence due to redundancy and phraseological incoherence due to lack of syntactic correlation between sentences. Finally, we offer as a recommendation a series of strategies designed to improve the handling of the written code in university students.