Proposal to evaluate initial academic literacy at the university level

Abstract

This article proposes a critical review of the Chilean admission system to higher education, in terms of reading tests, as well as its correlation with the teaching of academic discourse in the first years of university life, as this requires an immersion in a system of genres, codes and registers of the academy. For this purpose, first a brief historical review is made, taking into account the main changes in reading tests and the current situation of reading comprehension assessment. Then, a brief exposition of the main epistemological and methodological guidelines involved in the genres of academic discourse is made, to finally propose an analytical study that makes possible the implementation of an appropriate evaluative instrument to diagnose academic reading and writing skills, in view of the fact that admission tests evaluate reading skills in a general way and do not constitute a diagnostic evaluation of the initial literacy level of the applicants.