The article presents a preview of the research entitled Characterization of the difficulties in basic language skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing in the first semester students of the University Foundation Maria Cano FUMC. As objectives are to identify the difficulties that arise in the basic skills of the language used by students in the first semester of 2012, in order to design a methodology that improves the operation that is performed on your academic reality. The study is being conducted under the logic of the research of an empirical analysis, with a depth descriptive and correlational analysis, from a non-experimental design. The analysis units were built: basic language skills with the variables that guided the analysis in this case were listening, speaking, reading and writing, 2.Elementos involved in communication and the variables considered: transmitter, receiver, message and channel. The target population consisted of 232 students of different races. Was used as a tool for collecting information that facilitated a Likert scale describing the behavior of the variables and statistical analysis.