Introduction:

Continuously check the problems about the scarce reading and writing skills of students of the different educational levels, including the university, as well as show that the training of students in these skills has been scarce in some educational systems in Latin America, are valid reasons for continue the investigations in this regard.

Objective:

In this sense, the purpose was to describe the beliefs (social representations) built on the domain of the language in university students from Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Cuba.

Materials and methods:

The Discourse Analysis method was used, the sample was integrated by 289 students belonging to eight universities, as a data collection instrument a diagnostic test was used and the data were analyzed by descriptive statistics complemented with content analysis.

Results:

The main findings reveal high and medium valuation for the Spanish language proficiency category; consequently, the social representations found indicate that students have the belief that they have strategies that make them competent in the domain of the language. While for the reading comprehension, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels there is a predominance of regular and poor traits, which shows a poor management of basic linguistic skills.

Conclusion:

There is a clear contradiction between students' beliefs and the competencies they have.

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