School literacy: Reading and writing in a context of standardized evaluations in Chile

Abstract

The following paper analyzes the development of school literacy in Chile, in the context of the evaluative weight of standardized measurements, and how these alter the curricular guidelines in schools. The hypothesis is that writing suffers a displacement as a learning objective, given the centrality that reading comprehension acquires in external exams and, with it, the negative reassignment of contents that some school communities carry out, focusing almost exclusively on standardized preparation. This translates into the cancellation of the integrated work of the literacies, particularly the lack of spaces for writing. The reflection proposes three phenomena to understand this situation-problem that hinders the correct development of written production: (1) curricular fragmentation, (2) disarticulation of written metacognitive modeling, and (3) decontextualization of literate practices. On the other hand, we invite to reflect on how the scarce presence of writing in external measurements sets the tone for its teaching in the classroom.