Abstract

The higher education reading and writing tasks are expected to be performed by students in a competent way. However, experience in various fields allowed major deficiencies in students, which have led to various proposals for teaching reading and writing university. In order to provide data about the problems experienced by students in reading practice, when oriented to writing an academic text, this article examines some undergraduate students’ performance results are discussed in social sciences in a public university in the city of Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. The methodology used was mixed order. Firstly, it was analyzed the text produced by the students in which they reported a brief Literature Review on a subject. Therefore, an interview data was analyzed using students' reading experience in academic tasks. The results show how students manage to make some processes such as the recognition of key ideas, themes association or synthesis, but also how they experience difficulties such as joint ownership of ideas or arguments. The study showed, as one of the main conclusions, that these processes and difficulties are deeply related to reading demands according to students' scholar context.

Keywords:  Academic reading; Academic writing; College students; Mexico