Les stratégies de scripteurs avancés dans la révision de phrases complexes : description et implications didactiques

This thesis in teaching and learning of writing in French L1 focuses on secondary 4 and 5 writers’ revision strategies. This qualitative and exploratory multiple case study aims at (1) identifying advanced writers’ (16-year-old) revision strategies of syntactic errors, (2) describing their use of specific syntactic strategies, including basic sentence model and syntactic manipulations, and (3) describing how they use different complex sentence structures in their revisions. The method involves simultaneous think-aloud protocols combined with two revision tasks, one involving a text written by the participants, and another involving an experimental text containing 22 errors related to complex sentence structures. Advanced writers’ revisions and verbalisations were analysed in terms of (1) the category of the revised errors, (2) the accuracy of their revisions as well as (3) the strategies they used to detect, diagnose and correct their errors. Descriptive statistical analyses show that most of the advanced writers’ revisions are accurate, but a significant number of syntactic errors remain undetected, especially in their own texts. An analysis of the strategies used by the students reveals that they underuse detection strategies, but call upon different diagnosis strategies such as rereading, critical thinking and using grammaticality judgements. Furthermore, advanced writers mostly revised their syntactic errors immediately after detecting a problem, and they were able to accurately target it. The inter-case comparison indicates that self-questioning strategies are mainly used by high-achieving writers while the traditional questions are mostly employed by low-achieving writers. The distribution of the diagnosis strategies suggests that high-achievers carefully select their strategies for a given problem and that they differ from average-achievers, who activate more strategies for the same problem, and from low-achievers, who employ fewer strategies. Strategic profiles, developed to highlight writers’ salient characteristics, show that the students may hold various postures regarding revision and syntax. For instance, they manage in quite a variety of ways the tension between syntactic and semantic constraints, and between surface editing and global revision. Results related to their uses of basic sentence and syntactical manipulations show that theses strategies are infrequent and rarely applied when revising complex sentences. Substitution is strongly related to revising homophones, while the basic sentence is strongly related to revising pronouns. Moving and deleting a clause are less frequent and are mostly associated with the use of commas. Traditional questions are related to grammatical functions in the verbal phrase. Finally, in their revisions, advanced writers tend to divide the sentences they consider to be too long – even if they are error-free – into two or more sentences. When they use subordinate clauses, which happens more often in the experimental text than in their own, they invoke syntactic acceptability rather than readability as was the case for sentence divisions. Juxtaposition and coordination of sentences are practically absent in all the advanced writers’ revisions.

Keyphrases: phrase complexe, revision strategies, syntactic errors, advanced writers, French teaching in secondary school, teaching and learning of writing, complex sentences, basic sentences, syntactic manipulations, grammaticality judgments