The writing of the scientific review at university: analysis of the competence of first-year students

The review is a hybrid text genre of an expository-argumentative nature that is very appropriate for initiation into the production of academic texts in higher education, as it enables the development of some of the communicative, discursive and linguistic skills inherent to academic texts. The aim of this paper is to present an analysis of reviews written in Basque by first-year university students in order to identify some indices for improving the current teaching intervention. The analysis of the reviews has focused on three levels: general planning of the text, nominal cohesion and modalisation. The results show that although the basic components of the macro structure of the review are included, certain aspects need to be improved, such as the introduction of the topic and objective of the text reviewed and the evaluation. Other difficulties are related to aspects such as the lack of precision in the use of academic terminology when referring to the reviewed text or its author, and the use of declarative verbs in accordance with the use of this genre. On the basis of the analysis carried out, we detail some of the didactic objects to be worked on with first-year university students.