Communicative
In the last decade, we have reconceptualized the reading level program initially used at the institution and known as the Theory of Six Readings (De Zubiría, M., 1995). This reconceptualization was brought about by the developments in Dialoguing Pedagogy, which led us to abandon the central concept of the Six Readings proposal. Reading is not decoding, as we had initially assumed, since reading cannot be understood as a passive act in which we proceed like a blank slate in the search for meanings. Reading cannot be understood exclusively as a decoding process, through which the meanings contained in words are "extracted." This is so because reading interpretation involves both the ideas, attitudes, and values expressed in the written text and the ideas, attitudes, and values held by the reader, which are demarcated within a specific social and historical context. Therefore, reading and writing must be understood as sociolinguistic competencies.
Several authors had advanced similar reflections (Gadamer, 1984; Eco, 1981; Zuleta, 1982, 2005 edition; García Madruga, et al., 1995; Van Dijk, 1996 and 1998).
Gadamer (1984) had formulated the thesis of the hermeneutic circle to characterize the reading process in two distinct senses: comprehension and interpretation. Comprehension occurs—according to this theory—when the reader constructs the meaning of the discourse, identifies its essential ideas or semantic structure, and demonstrates a deep understanding. Interpretation occurs once the discourse has been understood, and in this case, the reader can proceed to construct and express an argued value judgment about it.
Eco (1981) considers that every text "...is riddled with blank spaces, with interstices that must be filled; whoever issued it anticipated that they would be filled in, and left them blank (...) In other words, a text is issued so that someone can update it; even when it is not expected (or desired) that someone concretely and empirically exist."
Zuleta (1982, 2005 edition) supports a dialogical view of reading; and after analyzing Nietzsche, he concludes:
By emphasizing interpretation, Nietzsche rejects any naturalistic or instrumentalist conception of reading: reading is not consuming, receiving, or acquiring. Reading is working. What we have before us is not a message in which an author informs us, through words, of his experiences, feelings, thoughts, or knowledge about the world, so that we, armed with a code we share with him, try to discover "what he wanted to tell us."
And later he adds:
Just as having good or bad eyesight means looking from somewhere, in the same way you have to read from somewhere, from some perspective, which is nothing other than an open question, a question not yet answered, which works in us and on which we work with a reading (Zuleta.1982, 2005 edition).
This reconceptualization of reading as a dialogical rather than a decoding process required a profound change in the language program, one that conceived of reading as an interactive process between the reader and the text and between the text and the context, one that recognized that when we read we use mental models to represent situations, but that maintained the characterization of competencies by levels, as proposed by Van Dijk, as is necessary for any type of competency and as it has been characterized by other instances and in other latitudes (Van Dijk, 1994 and 1997; and De Zubiría, 2008). The global evaluation program of interpretive competencies in science, language and mathematics, known by its acronym in English, called PISA, defines, for example, reading as follows (PISA, 2006):
Reading literacy is the ability to understand, use, and analyze written texts to achieve reading objectives, develop knowledge and abilities, and participate in society.
From the above, it is clear that it is necessary to characterize sociolinguistic competencies for each cycle, since each must define guidelines for mediating reading and writing, and guidelines for determining whether students are achieving the minimum levels required in these competencies. Working on sociolinguistic competencies requires joint action from all cycle teams to guarantee the proposed goals; this is even more so in a country where only 2% of students who complete secondary education reach a high level of interpretive competence, while 1% reach this level in argumentative competence and 1% in propositional competence (ICFES, 2008 at icfes.gov.com).
In general terms, one can also speak of four major levels in the development of essential sociolinguistic competencies: a first level of textual reading and writing; a second level of inferential reading and writing; a third level of contextual and in-depth reading and writing of discourses; and a fourth, and final, level of critical reading and writing.