Espirales. Revista multidisciplinaria de investigación científica, Vol. 5, No. 39

October - December 2021. e-ISSN 2550-6862. págs 67-83

https://doi.org/10.31876/er.v5i39.803

The writing of university students in a Venezuela in crisis

La escritura de universitarios en una Venezuela en crisis

Sandra Maurera Caballero*

Received: January 08, 2021.

Approved: July 11, 2021.

Abstract

The research presents the writing competence of young Venezuelan

university students considering the surrounding extra-academic and

academic situation. It is qualitative and descriptive, based on a field

research carried out in 2018 at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello,

Caracas with 37 students in their first semester of Social

Communication, Psychology and Education. It was carried out in

three phases developed during 15 weeks: diagnosis, intervention and

verification of changes in writing. It concludes that there was progress

in pragmatic notions or factors to be considered in moments prior to

writing and during the process itself, referring to metacognitive,

cognitive and axiological aspects. It is suggested to continue working

on all these aspects so that there is consolidation of what has been

achieved and not involution.

Keywords:

Venezuela, crisis, writing, University.

* Master's Degree, Universidad Técnica

Particular de Loja, Loja, Ecuador,

symaurera@utpl.edu.ec,

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0665-2072

Cite this:

Maurera, S. (2021). The writing of

university students in a Venezuela in

crisis. Espirales. Revista

Multidisciplinaria de investigación

científica, 5(39), 67-83

The writing of university students in a Venezuela in crisis

Espirales. Revista multidisciplinaria de investigación científica, Vol. 5, No. 39

October - December 2021. e-ISSN 2550-6862. págs 67-83

Introduction

The purpose of this study is to present the writing competence of young Venezuelan

university students considering the extra-academic and academic situation that

surrounds them. The approach is made through the socio-economic scenario exposed

by university teachers and the writing production of students in the first semester of

Social Communication, Psychology and Education at the Universidad Católica Andrés

Bello, Caracas.

From a superstructural point of view, in order to achieve the objective, this text was

organized in three essential sections, in addition to the Introduction and Final

Reflections: the first -Contextualization- refers to the importance of language proficiency

as a way to develop intelligence; the second -An approach to the Venezuelan scenario-

describes a university context battered by a deep political, economic and social crisis;

and the third -Student production- examines the writing competence of young people

through their productions and a work or intervention plan.

Writing and reading have offered humans the possibility of knowing and of developing

higher cognitive operations of high complexity such as abstraction (Vygotsky,

1995/1934 and Luria, 1987/1976) and evaluation and implication (Guilford, 1967). José

Antonio Marina, almost two decades ago, returned to the subject, but now from a

philosophical perspective:

reading is not important because it is fun, nor because it transmits information,

but because of something more transcendental: because human intelligence is

linguistic intelligence. It is only thanks to language that we can develop it,

understand the world, invent great things, live together, clarify our feelings, solve

Resumen

La investigación presenta la competencia escrituraria de jóvenes

universitarios venezolanos considerando la situación extra-académica

y académica que le circunda. Es cualitativa y descriptiva,

fundamentada en una investigación de campo que se llevó a cabo en

2018 en la Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, núcleo Caracas con 37

estudiantes que cursaban el primer semestre de las carreras

Comunicación Social, Psicología y Educación. Se efectuó en tres fases

desarrolladas durante 15 semanas: diagnóstico, intervención y

constatación de cambios en la escritura. Concluye que hubo avances

en las nociones pragmáticas o factores que deben considerarse en

momentos previos a la escritura y durante el proceso en sí referido a

aspectos metacognitivos, cognitivos y axiológicos. Se sugiere que se

continúe trabajando en todos esos aspectos para que haya

consolidación de lo logrado y no involución.

Palabras clave:

Venezuela, crisis, escritura, Universidad.

Sandra Maurera Caballero

Espirales. Revista multidisciplinaria de investigación científica, Vol. 5, No. 39

October - December 2021. e-ISSN 2550-6862. págs 67-83

our problems, make plans. An intelligence full of images and empty of words is a

minimal, coarse and almost useless intelligence. (...) For our intelligence to be

lively, flexible, insightful, amusing, rational, convincing, we need, first of all, to

know many words [because each] word is a tool for analyzing reality.

In those times, it used to be required in the academic environment that students should

respect spelling, punctuate well, structure sentences correctly and integrate their

paragraphs with a main sentence and several secondary sentences; while

simultaneously textual notions began to be introduced, first from Systemic Functional

Grammar, and then from Textual Linguistics. At present, these requirements are

maintained, but others of a communicative or pragmatic nature have been added. At

the time of writing, scribes were asked to consider the addressee, the relationship

between the addressee and the sender, and the purpose of the writing.

This present document testifies to the passage from sentence to text and from text to

discourse; also from the determination of writing as a product to the value of writing as

a process and of metacognition as a very important accumulation of strategies.

Theoretical progress has been made and the teacher's task has become more complex,

but the path that leads to writing competence has also become more real and level.

Accepting this psychological, pedagogical and didactic reality arising from this area of

knowledge, we will now review what is happening in Venezuela.

Despite the many efforts made and the fact that Venezuela was declared free of illiteracy

on October 28, 2005 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural

Organization (UNESCO), its reality is not satisfactory. It is confronted with severe

restrictions of various kinds that have a direct impact on education and language

proficiency. Venezuelan specialists continue to lament the meager student performance

associated with the area of oral and written language at all levels, which belies the merits

considered to receive the aforementioned declaration. In this order of ideas,

recapitulated Serrano de Moreno and Mostacero in 2014:

Forty-nine years have passed since Angel Rosenblat published La educación en

Venezuela: voz de alerta (Education in Venezuela: a voice of alert) in 1964. In

almost half a century the situation has not changed nor has it been intervened, on

the contrary, it has reached much more worrying levels since the difficulties that

students usually have with conventional writing are now added to those derived

from the use of the same but with technological and digital supports (p.11).

This panorama could get a little darker, since there are university professors who

maintain that during the last two decades the national government has made efforts,

on the one hand, to reduce student linguistic and communication skills and, on the other

hand, to annul the university as an institution that produces solutions to social problems.

All of us who are active in the university educational apparatus can attest to how

the oral and written expression of our students in the last fifteen years has declined

The writing of university students in a Venezuela in crisis

Espirales. Revista multidisciplinaria de investigación científica, Vol. 5, No. 39

October - December 2021. e-ISSN 2550-6862. págs 67-83

and their thinking has become less capable of producing and understanding

nuances and complexities (Leáñez, 2015, p.76).

Leáñez relates our circumstances to the political calamity that is currently dismantling

the country. He explains how the government has tried to minimize the appropriate

uses of language, to undermine it in order to disable the higher cognitive competences

of citizens and to dismantle linguistic intelligence. He assures that the government,

through its discourse, builds a dystopian society and that leaders, even educated public

figures, strive to establish themselves in power through the total and unique narrative,

the reiteration of empty and hollow expressions, phrases or words, charged exclusively

with emotion. At the same time, it lays siege to the universities. By withdrawing financial

support for research, scientific productivity has declined. In this regard, Betancourt

(2018) stated the following:

The deterioration of the country has permeated to all levels, including academic

spaces. Every day more and more researchers and professors emigrate from the

country in search of better opportunities and leave behind a vacuum, with which

it is difficult to face and train the future, which condemns us to involution in the

scientific and technological development of Venezuela.

And he made his case very well:

In June 2014, the journal Nature, already revealed that our science was falling

shockingly in the scientific indexes between the years 2009-2013, and currently

the fall does not stop, experiencing a decline of 79% between 2009 and 2017.

The results are clear, we are less competitive than the rest of the countries in the

region and we have been not only in the last place in growth, but we have

regressed to the decade of the 80's of the last century. We have lost 30 years!

Vinogradoff (2018) updated the data with a barren picture: educational institutions

remind ghost towns, desolation, deterioration and looting spread in them; exodus and

student absence increased by 60%, while teacher resignation ranges between 30% and

40%. Hurtado (2018) finishes describing the crisis: the university is becoming, in "spaces

full of uncertainty where survival becomes the main challenge of all" its members. What

hungry, what deprived will advance major research projects? In this way, by demolishing

dignity and undermining the quality of life, the malevolent and not at all candid purpose

of gradually contracting the importance of the university for society is achieved.

By virtue of the above and with the desire to contribute with a more detailed look at

what happens with the writing competence of Venezuelan university students, a

methodology was developed that will be detailed immediately as the first part of the

section entitled Student Production and that will be complemented as the description

of the actions progresses.

Sandra Maurera Caballero

Espirales. Revista multidisciplinaria de investigación científica, Vol. 5, No. 39

October - December 2021. e-ISSN 2550-6862. págs 67-83

Materials and methods

This field research, descriptive and qualitative, was developed in three stages:

Diagnosis, intervention and verification of changes in writing. She used a convenience

sample or "formed by the available cases to which we have access" (Hernández et al.,

2014, p.390). Specifically, the researcher worked with the 37 trainees who were in her

charge in the subject Production and Comprehension of Written Texts (4 hours per

week, equally distributed in two days, Monday and Wednesday) taught in the first

semester at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello (UCAB), at the Montalbán campus,

capital nucleus. Three students were enrolled in Psychology, one in Education and the

rest in Social Communication. The experience was carried out during the March-July

2018 academic cycle, which was taken in 16 weeks as established.

The first two class hours of the semester were reserved for the presentation of the

subject: i) The program, the work plan and the schedule of activities were socialized. ii)

The diagnosis for the following two hours was agreed upon, the actions to be carried

out during 13 weeks and iii) the final evaluation that would be given in the penultimate

one, after the execution of the mentioned intervention. For this evaluation, the reading

of the book Ethics for Lovers by Fernando Savater was assigned. This text was chosen

for its axiological value: its content would help to lead students along the path of values,

respect, effort, honesty and hope, while offering them the opportunity to express their

ideas in a society that is politically and economically unbalanced, and in which teachers

crusade every day to prevent it from sinking socially and morally.

How was the diagnosis developed? With the purpose of providing students with a

framework of knowledge about the topic that they should develop in the writing that

would be assessed as diagnostic, the first meeting was closed with the assignment of

the reading that would be discussed in the following two hours of class: Del sonido a la

grafía: texto oral y texto escrito by Barrera (1991). It was also recommended that they

complement it with other materials of their choice. Based on these readings, they

reflected and exchanged opinions in class during the following two hours. In the first

session of the second week, the students were asked to write an essay of four

paragraphs (one for the introduction, two for the development and one for the closing

or conclusion) on the care required in writing an academic text. The most relevant results

of this first phase will be presented below.

Results

Students erred in the placement of punctuation and accents in words that did not end

in "ción". They omitted the accent mark in monosyllabic voices, whose difference is

achieved with the diacritic (plus) and in such common bisyllables as the adverbs

"también" and "después"; but they could violently add it in equally familiar terms such

as the pronoun "éllos" and the preposition "desdé". As can be seen, in this last example

and in "úsar" some additional accents did not even coincide with the prosodic accent,

which denotes thoughtlessness or excessive spontaneity, attitudes that are enemies of

academic writing. Sporadically they used the semicolon and, indiscriminately, the

semicolon and the comma.

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Dysgraphia appeared in several words, always reflecting phonetic neutrality: "cede"

(place), "emosiones", "bulgar" and "conyeva". Transpositions ("spontaniedad") were

also found. The youngsters often confused ha/a and transcribed "through" in various

ways, also, they got different presentations of "because". They separated

inappropriately (cual quier), they agglutinated especially contiguous monosyllabic terms

(selo for se lo; yaque for ya que). Eventually, the enclitic or non-enclitic character of

some unstressed pronouns was ignored. They made substitutions in similar pairs such

as ósea/ o sea; sino/ si no. Occasionally, lexias emerged whose meanings did not

correspond to the expected one (adquirir for satisfacer; metafórico for intangible or

imperceptible) or which were created on the basis of some analogical criterion

(escribemente).

Paragraphs of a single sentence, almost always simple, abounded. When they tried to

build a complex one, they compromised cohesion.

Figure 1.

Exercise 1

The referent (unstressed and personal pronouns) and the agreement of gender, number

and verb tense are lost. The pronominal locution "la cual" was reiterated as an imprecise

anaphora. To connect ideas, the use of the conjunctions "ya que" and "y"

predominated. It was evident that the habit of using the relative adverb "donde" as a

connector is remarkably widespread. The oral trait was seen in the unconnected

juxtaposition of statements, which reflects thoughtless writing or writing without order

or agreement of the ideas evoked; also in the addition of sentence after sentence

without finishing the development of the idea, resulting in truncated structures or

syntactic dislocation and entanglement of notions. Copulative verbs or verbs empty of

content (ser and estar) predominated.

From the point of view of the overall organization, the introduction followed by a

development outline was the best. The conclusion or closing was almost never

elaborated. Only one student initiated, developed and closed. The paratextual aspect

showed an absence of headings and subheadings, and little attention to the

symmetrical distribution achieved with the use of indentation, uniform margins and

structural formalization of paragraphs.

With respect to the contents of the ideas, the works that prevailed were those that

reiterated with significant proximity the words of the text read, that is, the students did

not dare to propose different ideas or to integrate contents from different texts as they

were proposed. The following are samples of writing that moved away from repetition,

but whose ideas were not so clear and in which the implicatures are rather

distinguishable:

Sandra Maurera Caballero

Espirales. Revista multidisciplinaria de investigación científica, Vol. 5, No. 39

October - December 2021. e-ISSN 2550-6862. págs 67-83

Figure 2.

Exercise 2

The idea of language as defense or threat and erring is not understood. Nor how the

first sentence and the second complement each other. It is deduced that the second

idea has to do with the confusions generated by lack of contextual knowledge. On the

other hand, a lack of agreement is also identified with the unstressed pronoun that

should be "les" because it refers to "mensajes"; likewise, the preposition "a" preceding

"mensajes" is missing. Finally, it should be noted that the two commas and the tilde

were added by the teacher during the revision process.

In the second sample, in addition to the reiteration of "ya que" as a connector, as in the

previous fragment, there is some confusion and disconnection in the development of

the ideas, perhaps produced by the use of improper terms (delicada) and the gerund

(siendo). The idea is understood given the framework of the reader's knowledge.

Figure 3.

Exercise 3

Although we lack the means to compare and corroborate the words of Serrano de

Moreno and Mostacero (2014), and those of Leáñez (2015) and others, who refer that

the levels of inadequacy in this era are higher than yesterday, the texts reviewed testify

to several shortcomings. Also, the exposition of ideas remains very close to the notions

handled by the author read, which could mean insecurity or incompetence to expose

their own arguments.

Work plan or intervention

After reviewing the texts produced and considered as diagnostic, over thirteen (13)

weeks the four thematic units demanded by the program of the subject were

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developed: Spelling, Introduction to textual typologies, Strategy for critical

understanding of expository and argumentative academic and informative texts, and

Production of expository and argumentative texts.

Following the guidelines of competency-based teaching, the intervention combined

theory and practice, emphasizing practice. Considering the principles of Academic

Literacy (Carlino, 2011), several activities were carried out in pairs or in groups of up to

four learners, although individual activities were also carried out, especially during

moments dedicated to reflection at the beginning and end of the activities. From the

theories of writing, traditional approaches were integrated for the teaching-learning of

spelling and sentence writing; textual for cohesion and coherence, paragraph and text

writing; and communicative to address the purpose, context and addressee of writing;

the three approaches were supported by writing as a process (Cassany et al., 1994) and

metacognition (Flavell, 1979, p. 907).

The dynamics used to be developed in this way: students were informed in advance by

e-mail about the topic to be covered the following week, the purpose of the activity and

the benefits they would obtain with that knowledge. Despite the fact that the subject is

instrumental in nature and that production and comprehension were evaluated

exclusively, students were also provided with theoretical material that offered the

possibility of structuring previous knowledge (spelling and punctuation rules issued by

the Royal Spanish Academy, Fragments of Enseñar lengua on textual typology, textual

properties, adequacy, etc.).

About 15 minutes of the first two hours of the weekly class were taken to inquire about

previous knowledge and the importance of mastering this content in professional life.

Then, the teacher, in about half an hour, would explain, supported by slides, the

corresponding theoretical postulate (e.g., accentuation rules, punctuation, use of capital

or lowercase letters, reading strategies and writing as a process, etc.). I always used a

good number of examples for the students to explain and exercises to solve. For

example, they punctuated a projected or printed text, marked words, differentiated the

main idea from the secondary ones in a paragraph, identified the superstructure,

performed paraphrasing or drafted paragraphs and texts that would be examined and

reworked later. These activities could be done in groups or individually.

Finally, the class ended with an oral summary prepared voluntarily by one or more

students about what had been discussed in that meeting. The teacher always monitored

the class and only if necessary would make clarifications. It was also agreed that, as an

autonomous activity, alone or accompanied, they should return in extra time and before

the next meeting perform other exercises, all with the aim of reviewing, evaluating the

draft and anchoring knowledge.

In the first 40 minutes of the following session (the last two hours of the week), the

students -individually, in pairs or in groups- read the material achieved by another

classmate, and then communicated to the whole group what they had found, what they

Sandra Maurera Caballero

Espirales. Revista multidisciplinaria de investigación científica, Vol. 5, No. 39

October - December 2021. e-ISSN 2550-6862. págs 67-83

believed to be correct, incorrect and even aspects that raised doubts. The listeners

wrote down the irresolutions, clarifications and questions that arose from these

interventions and their experience in order to express them publicly and initiate a

guided discussion. The teacher also wrote down any inaccuracies in content and

procedural or attitudinal aspects on which she felt she should return before the end of

the class. She would spend the last half hour attending to student demands and

addressing what she believed to be indispensable. Finally, if a student requested it or

if the teacher felt that a point should be taken up again in the following week, she would

assign a reading, exercise or internet consultation, as was the case, for example, with

"donde" used as a connector and "sendos" referred to with a different meaning than

the standard one.

Before asking the students to write paragraphs autonomously, they practiced on the

basis of various themes and topics. They started their elaboration with single or isolated

sentences. One operated as the main idea and others as secondary ideas. They

identified in each one the subject, the verb and the object. They added juxtaposition

and then made adjustments in search of texture. To do this, they relied on the use of

anaphora, cataphora, ellipsis, synonyms, connectors, avoidance of repetition, etc. As

corrections were made, they elaborated drafts. Sometimes, up to five versions of the

same paragraph were produced.

Paragraph classification was approached considering their function depending on the

place they occupy within the text and the type of text being constructed: paragraphs

for the introduction, for the development and for the conclusion. Thus, different models

were reviewed and introductory paragraphs were constructed (those posing a problem,

announcing the order of the information, relating anecdotes, asking questions, etc.);

developmental paragraphs (conceptual, sequential or chronological, comparative, etc.)

and concluding paragraphs (summary, affirmative, projective, interrogative, etc.).

On several occasions, the teacher collected the students' productions and reworked

them, that is, she evaluated them as draft versions and showed the different

compositions in the classroom so that the students could find the differences, explain

and justify what had been optimized. On four occasions, he even showed gradations of

improvements. In this way, the students fixed that each draft represented a substantive

improvement of the text in question. This was the indirect way of including the theory

and practice of writing as a process: the scribes were induced to read, extract different

information and integrate it; to paraphrase, edit and revise.

Procedural and attitudinal aspects were addressed. Emphasis was placed on the need

for language proficiency not only as an epistemic resource, but also as a human right

and ideological resource. We worked with documents such as La inteligencia y la

palabra by Marina (1997), El tamaño del mundo by Uslar (1986) and Periodismo cultural

by Gabriel Zaid (2006). In several videos, situations were analyzed in which the lack of

knowledge compromised the professional prestige of a social communicator in

functions and digital language challenges were made, the first student who sent an

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email to the teacher in which he/she solved a linguistic riddle received an additional

positive that favored his/her qualification.

From values and the need for the development of critical thinking, the Venezuelan crisis

was addressed in essays such as Morir lejos de casa: el exilio médico de los venezolanos

by Chang (2017) and Comer basura: la última esperanza para sobrevivir by Yorman

Guerrero (2017). Reading was always understood as a complex activity that demands at

least tasks distributed in three stages: strategies before reading, during and post-

reading. In the interventions with respect to this type of reading, care was taken that

the student used arguments by ethos and logos, if he resorted to arguments by pathos,

after his exposition, an opinion was given and with questions (or mayeutic technique) it

was achieved that he reelaborated his commentary now from reason or from ethics;

additionally, it was requested that he or others distinguish the different Aristotelian

arguments wielded: logos, ethos or pathos. The purpose of this activity was twofold:

first, to work on the development of critical thinking and, second, for students to respect

the opinion of others and to understand the natural nature of diversity of thought.

After completing the programmed activities aimed at improving student writing, the

first session of week 15 reflected on the content of Ética para Amador and on the

paratextual aspect. In the latter, we discussed the author, the purpose and addressee

or motivator of the work and its organization, the prologue, the chapters and

subchapters. The first one discussed several topics dealt with in the work: ethics,

freedom and decision; the challenges of life, whims, responsibilities and consequences

of actions; the good and bad life; being a jerk, empathy, courage, cowardice, comfort

and conformity. This content was related to the Venezuelan reality, corruption, freedom,

justice, education, quality, the practice of values, etc. This was to ensure that each

student possessed the framework of knowledge at the time of writing about the play,

which he or she had to do in the second meeting of that week.

Changes in college students' writing after thirteen weeks of work.

On that day, students were asked the following activity: In the current Venezuelan

scenario, how useful is the work Ethics for Amador? Why? Argue your answer based on

the content of the book. Develop a writing that contains an introduction, a development

and a conclusion. Also, do not exceed five paragraphs. Remember that the writing

process involves three phases: planning, writing, and revising. The following are the

results of your writing:

Although there were improvements in most students in all aspects, insufficiencies still

persist. These results recall the words of Carlino (2003): one does not learn to write once

and forever. Nevertheless, two clear advances were identified: i) there was no

dysgraphia, because students who identified words with complex or unknown

morphology asked for their correct spelling or consulted the Internet, which is valued

as an advance because they recognized the need to respect the norm and because it

denotes reflection. The oral and written codes support each other, but they are different

Sandra Maurera Caballero

Espirales. Revista multidisciplinaria de investigación científica, Vol. 5, No. 39

October - December 2021. e-ISSN 2550-6862. págs 67-83

and work with different socio-cognitive mechanisms. ii) All the texts achieved the

introduction, development and conclusion, which shows that there was no overtly

thoughtless writing; the students thought about what information should be placed in

each part of the manuscript. However, there was one scribe who subtitled with the

nomination of these, deviating from what was agreed:

Figure 4.

Exercise 4

In the introduction paragraphs, there were anecdotes, questions and even quotations:

Figure 5.

Exercise 5

Similar progress was noted in the last paragraphs of the writings. The producers closed

the ideas they developed, added questions and even quotation marks to third-party

comments:

Figure 6.

Exercise 6

Paragraphs, such as this conclusive pair, were constituted by more than one sentence

that, due to the correct syntax, let the different ideas be clearly seen, although some

capital letters are missing (Maybe). The use of conclusive connectors is appreciated (In

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conclusion, ...). These examples also show progress in the use of punctuation marks

such as commas and periods, as well as in the use of accents. The "qué" that marks an

indirect question, the "por qué" with the accent and separated and the accenting of

the first person singular of the postpreterite of the verbs "saber" and "poder" are

valued, as well as the temporal concordance that is maintained in the development of

ideas thanks to this verb tense.

Figure 7.

Exercise 7

In some paragraphs, crossing out evidences reading and rereading. Paragraphs

elaborated on the basis of developed ideas are observed. However, the correct use of

commas to separate elements or sentences within the same statement (malo, aunque...)

or the use of the semicolon as a reference of syntactic autonomy and conclusion of ideas

(aplica. ¿Tú....?), as shown below, needs to be strengthened:

Figure 8.

Exercise 8

These fragments also show the incorporation of new connectors: "si bien", "aunque"

and the stressing of monosyllabic voices in some cases: in "tú" pronoun, but not in the

adverb "sí".

The four referenced fragments indicate that the use of indentation was not absolutely

achieved, nor were the margins uniform, although they are now more regular; in fact,

no excessively asymmetrical paragraphs or texts were identified.

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Only two students forgot to title the essay, the rest produced titles such as the following:

Ethics in Venezuela; Ethics for Amador and its necessity in the Venezuelan reality; Ethics

for Amador; Ethics for a better Venezuela; The ambiguity of freedom; Re-learning to

live. These can be interpreted as a synthesis of the global understanding of the text.

With respect to the content of the writings and the social, moral, economic and political

situation of Venezuela, the students observe serious problems. They are convinced that

a change of mentality is urgently needed in all people. Their main concerns are freedom

and dishonesty. The former they link to political issues and hold the government

responsible for improper actions; the latter they relate to generalized misconduct. They

are of the opinion that the loss of values extends to different areas and levels. They

believe that by abandoning individual interests for group interests and that with honesty

and effort, the country's course can be changed.

Conclusions

The approach to university writing was proposed considering the undermined

educational reality of the country that has been described by some Venezuelan teachers

working in Higher Education. Since it was about writing, it was always considered that

students should have information to communicate, that is to say, that they should

possess a framework of knowledge.

In the first instance, they were asked to write a four-paragraph text on the care required

in writing an academic text. In general, the content of their writings showed excessive

adherence to the original text, conformism (or laconism) in explaining that there were

two codes (one oral and the other written): they defined, characterized and little else.

Only one student detached himself from the original text and referred to writing as a

weapon of defense or threat, although he was unable to adequately develop this idea.

Regarding formal and textual aspects, several inadequacies were recognized, which

denoted a poor level of writing. There were spelling errors, especially in ll/y; v/b, etc.

The almost total tildado in acute words ending in "ción" stood out, but there were many

mistakes and certain additions in other kinds of words. Eventually, amalgamations

appear in contiguous monosyllabic words and undue separation. Syntactic maturity was

lacking; in the development of complex ideas, coherence in number, gender and time

is lost, as well as the subject as reference. Juxtaposition and the use of connectors such

as "and" and "since" abound. Only one student managed an essay with introduction,

development and closing.

Based on this finding, an action plan was designed, to be developed in thirteen weeks,

based on the principles of traditional grammar (spelling, accentuation and

paragraphing), textual linguistics (coherence and cohesion), pragmatics

(appropriateness, context, purpose and relationship between interlocutors), writing as

a process, metacognition and academic literacy (support among students through work

in pairs and groups).

The writing of university students in a Venezuela in crisis

Espirales. Revista multidisciplinaria de investigación científica, Vol. 5, No. 39

October - December 2021. e-ISSN 2550-6862. págs 67-83

The last piece of writing, an argumentative essay, shows important advances, the

university students improve their writing in all aspects. It is understood that the teacher

would have to be dishonest and the students very careless for there to be none, but

there were ethical attitudes that are considered of high positive value. It is believed that

improvement is most evident when students are intrinsically motivated. The techniques

that achieved this individual commitment were retolanguage and YouTube videos

containing real cases in which the prestige of a professional was affected by his or her

lack of training.

In practice, only two students remained attached to the idea of writing as a product, the

rest planned their writing and used the rough draft. Likewise, they are more concerned

about using punctuation marks and understand that their arbitrary use not only

compromises a professional, but also the ideas they wish to convey and the purpose of

their text. Students hesitate when writing complex words (e.g., exhaustive), so they ask

or consult, which indicates reflection before writing and respect for the norm.

The progress achieved shows the need to incorporate the entire university in this

movement or, in the worst case, to include another subject in the following semester

that will allow the young people to consolidate the writing skills they have started and

insist on consolidating the positive attitude towards language proficiency. Sixteen to

fourteen weeks serves primarily to make students aware of the existence of the

regulations and the importance of complying with them, as well as to get them on track,

but not to master writing, which may take a lifetime.

From the axiological and attitudinal points of view, the last essay elaborated from the

reading Ethics for Amador, shows that the young people believe, dream or hope that if

they change their behavior they can build a better nation; they expressed this through

arguments by ethos and logos. As in the classroom activities, they worked on the

abandonment or overcoming of simple arguments by pathos and on the incorporation

and diversity of ethical and rational arguments, these results suggest that, in spite of

certain political actions that the national government is believed to be taking to

undermine important cognitive operations, teachers continue to have the possibility of

favoring the development of the deductive, reflective and critical faculties of students,

which ratifies Savater (1991): "We are not free to choose what happens to us (...), but

free to respond to what happens to us" (p.16).

…………………………………………………………………………………………….

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