In the current educational paradigm, among the competences, which are the responsible for molding the curriculum all over the world (Labraña, A. M., Durán, E., Ajenjo, G., y Hansel, G., 2010), a competence which stands behind our students’ success must be highlighted. It is the competence in Linguistic Communication (Pérez Esteve, 2008). The Reading Competence, as a fundamental part of the linguistic communication, is no longer understood as a mere decoding of texts in the early school years, and now it is seen as an ongoing combination of knowledge, skills and strategies that the individuals are developing along their lives, in diverse contexts and with different aims (OCDE, 2006). In the year 2004, Montanero Fernández realized that the evaluation of this complex skill was being repeatedly used as one of the most discriminatory indexes, by emphasizing the educative differences between regions and countries.
The research carried out by the Junta de Andalucía (2012), has confirmed the results of Pérez Esteve from a quantitative point of view. So, it is observed that the level of the Communicative Competence in Secondary Education correlated with the results obtained after assessing the level of other competences, like the mathematic or the scientific ones.
It is necessary to consider the international evaluations like the TIMSS or PISA (OCDE, 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015), which state that the level of the Spanish student in the Communicative Competence, and in the other ones, is below the average. This situation is also the same in the first year of the Grade in all Spanish universities. According to Velásquez Rivera, Cornejo Valderrama y Roco Videla (2008), the low performance of the university students in comprehension tasks when taking national and international tests, is a well-known situation by all of us. Teachers and researchers of the educational area have pointed at the urgency to design and implement developing programmes of reading skills in all the academic levels.
It is also a fact that the imbalance that exists between the results obtained in Secondary Education and requirements in the University stage produces a high rate of academic failure among the students (MECD, 2012; García, M., & San Segundo, M. J., 2001). So, taking into account the peculiarities of the university context and the difficulties that our students have to face, we have implemented the first phases of a project of innovation (Nº Projects 2014-12-4001 y 2015-2-6012) during the academic courses 2014/2015 y 2015/2016. Its main objective is to reduce the negative effects which are typical of the normal transition from the Secondary Education to the University.
Bearing this objective in mind, several teachers from the Department of Education of Córdoba University have been implementing an educational model which is composed of three stages: Firstly, an initial evaluation, followed by a stage of training in the Linguistic Competence, finishing with a final assessment. The preliminary results seem to be promising and they will contribute to improve our students’ possibilities when facing the challenges which are typical of their new educative stage.
