UNESCO detects writing gap in Latin American schoolchildren

Santiago de Chile, 22 Mar Schoolchildren in the Latin American region have unequal performances in writing, with countries like Argentina leading vocabulary and countries like Panama where children struggle to develop ideas well, revealed on Tuesday the United Nations Educational Organization, the Science and Culture (UNESCO), The organization, with regional headquarters in Santiago de Chile, published the latest results of the Writing Test of the Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (ERCE 2019). It evaluated the writing performance of third and sixth grade students from 16 countries in the region: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic and Uruguay. The former were asked for a narrative letter about a trip and a text for the presentation of a dance, while the sixth graders were asked for a letter of request and a descriptive text of a non-existent animal. “Writing is a highly demanding competence at the cognitive level and, unlike oral language, it does not develop in most people naturally. That is why it must be taught from the earliest levels of the educational process,” said Claudia Uribe, director of the Regional Office for Education for Latin America and the Caribbean of UNESCO. Today, he added, “it is one of the most demanded skills in the workplace, being critical for good performance in multiple trades and professions.” The report studied “discursive domain” (communicative purpose and appropriateness to the slogan, gender and registration), “textual domain” (vocabulary, coherence, agreement and cohesion) and “readability” (spelling and punctuation). DIFFERENCES FROM NORTH TO SOUTH According to the text, students in Argentina have high performances in vocabulary and coherence of their texts, but they need to reinforce spelling and punctuation, especially in third grade. A similar situation affects schoolchildren in Cuba, who “show sufficiency in the textual domain”, but “must improve the association between sound and lyrics”. Uruguayans, for their part, “must improve the discursive mastery of their texts”, although they achieve “an adequate development of their writings”, while Peruvians write without repeating words and maintain the development of ideas, but they need to work on punctuation and adaptation to the genre that they ask for. In Colombia, spelling remains a challenge, although students use correct vocabulary and maintain the main subject of their texts. In Ecuador, they must strengthen the structure of texts, unlike Brazil, where “they use adequate vocabulary and are able to maintain a thematic unity with an informative progression”. In Panama, the study revealed that it is difficult for them to develop ideas and maintain consistency when writing a text: just over half of them managed to fit the purpose they were asked to write about. The scenario is similar in Honduras, where “only 4 out of 10 third-graders who wrote a letter achieved the highest performance in responding to the purpose and slogan they were asked to write about,” the document noted, noting similar deficiencies in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. In neighboring Costa Rica, however, they write adequate texts and maintain agreement between sentences, but they must improve in aspects of spelling and punctuation, as in the Dominican Republic, where only 13.7% of third-graders reached a high level of readability. CHIEF mmm/jm/dmt