Explora+: aproximaciones a un entorno virtual para el abordaje de textos académicos complejos

Abstract

Becoming a university student means entering into a new culture, which is partly shaped by academic genres. The texts included in the compulsory reading list were not written for students but for the specialists or researchers in the area. That is the reason why these texts are so difficult to understand: they were built over several assumptions that define the basis of the shared knowledge in one specific academic community.

The Innovation Center in Technology and Pedagogy (CITEP) developed a multimedia environment based on the hypertext notion. The multimedia environment provides digital tools to improve reading of academic genres: the editing teacher can create a new text named EXPLORA+, based on the hypertext. This new text explains the hypertext using links to define concepts, providing information about a difficult paragraph, recovering the social and historical context in which the text was written. 

This paper presents the results of a pilot carried out with a group of students of Spanish Grammar in Buenos Aires University. Firstly, the students were asked to answer some questions based on the source text. Afterwards, they logged in EXPLORA+, where they could find an hypertextual approach to the text. Finally, and based on this approach, they had to suggest improvements to the previous answers. The main purpose of this experience was to evaluate the benefits of EXPLORA+ environment in relation with the students’ reading comprehension.