I. INTRODUCTION

The development of reading and writing skills in the English language plays an important role in the teaching process of this language and must rely on the use of methodological tools that allow the students’ progress by associating their knowledge with the existing technological resources nowadays.

To reach the improvement of this process it is necessary that teachers apply the approaches that lead to the success of English learning by motivating students to participate in it.

Long ago, the fact that a person did not know a foreign language such as English was not an obstacle to make their dreams come true, because they could perform any role in any field without having studied this language.

However, since science is progressing every day in all the fields, this fact pushes individuals to prepare themselves as part of their moral obligation with their societies to be ready to face challenges. Therefore, to know English is an important factor that will be required and at the same time decisive to get a job. (Burt, Miriam, Kreeft Peyton, Joy and Schaetze Kirsten, Department of Education, 2008)

There are a lot of teaching strategies to be applied in the classroom that result in hours of fun for learners such as crosswords, songs, and all types of didactic games. These activities provide students with knowledge in context in addition to the sense of recreation.

It is important to mention that appropriate approaches to teach English efficiently have always existed throughout the time, but many teachers do not always apply them, causing lack of interest and demotivation for learning which definitely affect the teaching-learning process.

The methodological strategies to develop the students’ skills of reading and writing are basic to obtain a continuous improvement of learning. This fact will allow students to become critical, analytical, and develop a systemic thinking to boost the quality of education according to the demands of the Education Act.(Estrategias metodológicas: La comprensión en la clase de Inglés , 2011)

For there to be quality and warmth in education, it is essential not only to count on teachers with a good knowledge of English, but also that have methodological and andragogic training to enable them to offer a good service educational. A great number of professionals think that the most important thing to be successful as English teachers is to have a good level of knowledge, but they are wrong because the lack of useful methodology influences their good development as teaching professionals. Moreover, teachers must consider their permanent training about methodological issues that help them prepare lessons in a different and motivational way to change the traditional and conventional types of classes that nowadays are useless and do not give the results that are expected.

II. DEVELOPMENT

1. Methodology

This research proposes the implementation of active methodological strategies to obtain positive outcomes from students of the different English modules that are taught at the State University of Milagro which will provide confidence in the development of reading and writing when incorporating useful and relevant vocabulary and grammar structures in context.

The students’ limited ability to perform reading and writing tasks at the State University of Milagro impedes their efficient performance in these areas. Therefore, students feel frustrated because of their poor production, due to the scarce lexical and grammar structures that they have which definitely affects negatively their creativity and quality of their writings of paragraphs, stories and articles.

This limitation turns evident at the moment that students have to take assessments and they are not able to understand the real context of readings. In addition to this, there is a lack of students’ interest for learning English and a great number of them quit the modules after a short time of having started, other ones stay until the end, but do not show a relevant progress in mastering these skills, so what they do is to keep attending classes with the hope that their teachers do something extra to change their reality and be able to pass the modules.

It is important to assume that teaching, as in all of the professional fields has changed through the times and what it was effective before; it is not necessarily as effective and useful now, so it is time to break paradigms and renew the teaching methods of English language in order to guarantee quality in education.(Richards, Jack C & Rodgers, Theodore S, 2014)

In some countries, including Ecuador, the development of reading and writing in their mother tongue has not been efficient and shown a poor production which demonstrates that people have little interest on the development of these skills.

It is regrettable to read in the newspapers that only 10% of the population has the ability to write an article or text and in the classrooms just a few students prove to be competitive when reading and much fewer the ones who can perform as a good speaker in some speech or event.

Since the ability to read and write is limited in Spanish, it is logical to think that something similar likely happens in English because for some reasons the students do not like to work on reading nor writing tasks such as e-mails, formal or informal letters, summaries, short stories and articles.

Furthermore, a lot of students do not feel confident enough to participate in activities related to reading because they think they are exposed to the teasing from peers when they hear their pronunciation and notice their insecurity at the moment they are not able to answer questions.

It is important to mention that not all of them had opportunity to receive regularly English classes in high schools or the teachers who taught this subject were not specialized in this area. As a result of this, students do not have the same level or at least a basic one that lets them perform successfully in this subject when they start their studies at the university.

This is one of the main reasons that cause students to quit their English classes or fail their study modules. To change this situation, teachers must use effective strategies that involve motivation and interest for learning from students to help them develop reading and writing skills in the English language.

Expert Stephen Bailey (1986) in his text entitled Academic Writing, “indicates the importance that students develop a good level of writing, so that they can prepare written pieces of work with no difficulty, focusing on vocabulary definitions and grammar structures that are consistent with the language level”. Therefore, teachers should encourage the continuous practice of writing in the classroom by using strategic tools that motivate students to improve their understanding and cognitive area. (Bailey, 1986)

“It is useful that teachers alternate activities, for example, at the end of a story, teachers can consider checking the students’ personal opinions about it, proposing to mention details that leads a step by step summary or any oral activity that includes a discussion or a forum that remarks their points of view to make the class more attractive and help learners improve their critical and analytical thinking”(Bailey, 1986)

(Doyle, 2010), in his book Helping Students Learn in a Learner-Centered Environment, “states that students are not motivated to read since they consider that they are not good at it, therefore the teacher is the one who must help their students get benefit when reading”.

This research work focus on the idea that teachers must prepare their teaching portfolio with didactic material based on suitable strategies that enable students to an active participation in the classroom that generates a real sense of cognitive learning and critical thinking in this language.

Therefore reading and writing skills are the bases that define the guidelines to be able to coordinate ideas and interact efficiently in this language. Students at the State University of Milagro show a series of problems when trying to use the English language because they do not handle a proper lexical so they cannot organize their ideas that allow them do good writings or work successfully on reading comprehension tasks, so their production is limited due to the scarce practice in the English laboratories and in the assignments that are sent to them to reinforce the learning process. This is shown during the teaching process of the modules and turns evident in the results of the midterm and final evaluations.

Since the technological resources offer a very high potential to learn foreign languages in a different and more effective way, it is worthy that teachers encourage their students to use this material that is free and available nowadays on the web and that definitely support the development of the language skills during their learning process.(Nikitina, 2012)

The Academic System Regulations approved by the Higher Education, in its Article 30 about Learning a foreign language states:

”The higher Education Institutions will guarantee the level of proficiency of the language to fulfil the graduation requirement for programs of the technical studies, high technicians or its equivalent or the ones of third degree. They must organize or homologate the corresponding subjects since the start of them. The sufficiency of the foreign language must be evaluated once the students have taken and passed 60% of the subjects; such proof enables them to the continuation of their studies” (Superior, 2008) .

In addition to the regular teachers in their staff, higher education institutions will hire expert teachers to offer students language courses in order to satisfy the demand of learning a foreign language. The sufficiency of a foreign language must be considered as one of the options among the admission requirements.

On the other hand, the use of portfolios that contain all the material that is going to be used during the English modules becomes a very useful educational resource for teachers due to the role they play by motivating interest to learn in students. .

It is intended through a good choice of learning activities to develop a constructivist perspective that teachers may be able to acquire with the aim of presenting a model of teaching English that helps students to be confident enough when reading and writing in this language. The results of this study show with no doubt that the activity of students are relatively limited since they are associated with a lack of confidence when they read because of a sense of insecurity they feel due to pronounce words incorrectly or by the limited critical thinking skills they have to understand pieces of information or texts, which can be improved if teachers plan in detail each of the steps to follow the teaching process of English in a productive way to make it effective.

Teachers' training must be assumed as a key part in their profession in this globalized world where all professionals have to be well-qualified to be competitive no matter what the professional fields are. This attitude should be internalized in each educator to generate and transmit their knowledge to students inside and outside the classroom.(Freeman, 2007)

The fact that teachers keep themselves active and updated ought to become a habit that allows them find new techniques and teaching methodology by using technology as useful tools for this purpose. This requires a lot of inner motivation to offer different quality in education.

Since the challenge of new educational approaches cannot be absent from these requirements, it is important to incorporate new tools of information, interactive resources, technologies and communication in the learning platform that is presented to students and try to use it as much as possible to get better results in this educational process.

Learning English as a foreign language requires having a lot of concentration and development of basic skills, as it is a language that has its own structures and rules that demands to maintain a discipline of study to acquire this knowledge.

Teachers need to work harder with reading and writing activities that include general and specific information which may require students to develop their cognitive side and critical thinking through the applying of useful techniques and strategies that help students to get autonomy and perform naturally (González, 2007). In addition, there is another opinion given by Ana Lucía Delmaestro who said “that is necessary to incorporate technological tools that the new theories of learning demand” (Delmaestro, 2005).

On the Internet there is a wide variety of material that turns greatly useful for learners of foreign languages so English is not the exception, as a matter of fact, most of the material that is on the web can be used to reinforce and develop all the English skills and contribute with the teachers roles. Specific activities are found in some websites which are being presented at the Annexes section of this paper.

2. Results

To support this research a survey with a pre-established format that contains 10 questions was applied to 103 students of the English modules of System Engineering at the State University of Milagro. From a total of 260 students, it was obtained a sample that represents 39.61%.

This work has a descriptive, qualitative and quantitative research modality and the results let the verification of the data collected through the survey, so it was possible to obtain valid conclusions of this research.

In this research, the Independent Variable is Methodological strategies and the Dependent Variable is Reading and writing skills.

For this a simple random sample was used with 103 students of the first English module who study System Engineering that were attending regular classes in the first semester 2014 during the morning, afternoon, and evening was selected to serve as a source of information for this study.

Analysis and discussion results

The information that was obtained through 103 students, who took the surveys, was analysed in detail to identify the bases that support this research. These results made possible recommendations about all the factors that affect the students’ development of reading and writing skills.

III. CONCLUSIONS

This research work highlights the need of using methodological strategies to help get students more confidence when learning English. Students proved that they have a serious problem related to the development of reading and writing skills, which becomes a barrier to develop the other skills and areas of this language and this way, affecting the learning process.

This problem causes disinterest of students to participate and work on exercises where critical thinking and cognitive development are required to produce assignments efficiently.

Students usually try to solve their problem by themselves by using technological tools, but sometimes they fail on this because they do not count on enough information about useful and at the same time safe websites that offer them the opportunity to learn English through wide types of exercises in an interactive way. On the other hand, it is a common fact that a lot of teachers do not offer the adequate support that students need for doing successful autonomous work.

Teachers must be aware of the updated technological tools and therefore use a variety of teaching methods about reading, writing and also the other skills and areas by considering English language as a whole that needs to be taught by integrating all its skills and components.

Considering the application of these methodological strategies results in the benefit for students who are going to be able to learn in a much more productive, motivational and efficient way. This fact will definitely contribute to improve the quality of education according to the trends of a globalized and demanding world.

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