Strategies for the development of reading comprehension in Spanish as a foreign language

Abstract

The students of the Preparatory Course (PC) from the Faculty of Spanish for Non-Spanishspeaking Foreigners (FENHI), at the University of Havana, who aspire to study university degrees in Cuba, jointly study Spanish, Exact Sciences and Technical Sciences. Among the main problems presented by these students when entering this course, some difficulties
in reading comprehension in Spanish are detected. Faced with this problem, the need arose to urgently apply teaching-learning strategies for developing reading comprehension of texts in the subjects of the study plan. The objective of this paper is, therefore, to share
the experiences of the authors in the application of the main reading strategies in the subjects Spanish, Chemistry and Biology, which contributed to the development of reading comprehension of specialized texts in these subjects, as didactic materials used in classes. Students should be aware of these strategies in the early stages of the course until they master and apply them according to their own needs.

As a result of this experience, it was possible to deepen the theoretical foundations of the strategies designed and applied in the teaching-learning process of the subjects Spanish, Chemistry and Biology in the Spanish language to contribute to the development of the reading comprehension of the students of the FENHI.

In addition, valuable reflections were produced on the impact of the aforementioned strategies on the learning of the Spanish language, by non-Spanish-speaking foreign students who will study Engineering and Architecture at Cuban universities.