Comprensión y producción de textos en alumnos universitarios: la reformulación textual

this paper sets out to report on findings about features of task-specific reformulation observed in university students in the middle stretch of the psychology degree course (n=58) and in a reference group of students from the degree courses in modern languages, spanish and library studies (n=33) from the national university of la plata (argentina). three types of reformulation were modeled: summary reformulation, comprehensive and productive reformulation.the study was based on a corpus of 621 reformulations rendered from different kinds of text. the versions obtained were categorised according to the following criteria: presence or absence of normative, morphosyntactic and semantic difficulties. findings show that problems arise particularly with paraphrase and summary writing. observation showed difficulties concerning punctuation, text cohesion and coherence , and semantic distortion or omission as regards extracting and/or substituting gist, with limited lexical resources and confusion as to suitability of style/register in writing. the findings in this study match those of earlier, more comprehensive research on the issue and report on problems experienced by a significant number of university students when interacting with both academic texts and others of a general nature. moreover, they led to questions, on the one hand, as to the nature of such difficulties, which appear to be production-related problems and indirectly account for inadequate text comprehension, and on the other hand, as to the features of university tuition when it comes to text handling.