COMPREHENSIVE READING DEVELOPMENT THROUGH LEARNING OBJECTS IMPLEMENTATION. CASE STUDY: IN ADVANCED WRITING AND ORAL EXPRESSION COURSE

Developing critical and inferential reading is a needed ability by the students in order to have an efficient reading of their assignments and identify what is needed whenever problems.

Nowadays Communication and information Technology (ICT) implementation at the educational field favors learning, and is making traditional methods evolve in several knowledge areas. This study is based in the learning object building process, in an effort to accomplish the pedagogical characteristics needed to assure competencies in the student. The objective of this article consists on employing those objects in the Advanced and Oral Expression course at the first semester in the Electric Engineering Academic Unit, which purpose costs on developing the basic reading comprehension capabilities: information analysis and synthesis. Comprehensive reading was chosen as the main topic due to the following: international assessment results and the first time selection process results are nor approbatory.

The methodology employed consisted on the following steps: first of all the 75 reading comprehension test was applied to the freshmen, where the general results were deficient. Second the learning objects were designed in order to improve their reading comprehension capabilities. Then following activities were deployed: first analogies were used as a mean to stablish relationships between words, in order to develop the student’s analytical capabilities.

Then reading comprehension exercises employed to identify main and secondary ideas, identifying context vocabulary, making inferences. The material employed was under creative commons or Copyleft material. Finally the results were evaluated employing an underlying technique and a storyboard technique.

The results of this application in several tests proved the need to: improve by the implementation of strategies to favor reading by the usage of the ICTs.