Expérimentation d'un enseignement réciproque pour améliorer la formulation d'inférences en compréhension de la lecture d'élèves du 3e cycle du primaire en contexte montréalais

It is only since the last few decades that reading comprehension has been the topic of experimental research in order to understand what learning to read means and what needs to be put in place to teach reading comprehension. So far, the literature has targeted inference as one of the components that plays a critical role in enabling a primary school student to have access to the meaning of a reading. The production of an inference manifests itself through the links to be established between the information provided by a text, what is called a cohesive inference, but also between this information and what the student knows about it, that is to say an inference of elaboration. For many students, answering an inferential question repre-sents a real challenge and it is important to study the teaching practices that can overcome this difficulty. This objective is at the heart of the present research, which concerns the experimen-tation of a teaching device, namely the reciprocal teaching, with the aim of improving the for-mulation of inferences of cohesion and elaboration among students from elementary cycle 3. The students participating in this research have mostly arrived in Quebec recently and hold the status of recent immigrants. Some of them combine this immigrant status with a precarious economic reality. All are considered to be able to follow the regular program of the ordinary class, the class in which the experiment takes place. Accompanied by 6 teachers, the 113 stu-dents who form the sample of this research were divided into 3 groups according to 3 experi-mental conditions. Group A consists of two classes that are experimenting the reciprocal teach-ing aimed at working on the cohesion and elaboration inference. Group B consists of two clas-ses in which teachers offer the teaching of strategies specific to reciprocal teaching and the two categories of targeted inferences, but in the context of a lecturing type of teaching. Group C includes two classes that make up the control group. Two measures of data collection are used to verify potential effects related to reciprocal teaching, namely a reading comprehension test and an interview. Mainly, we used Anova for statistical analysis. The results obtained show that the reading comprehension test does not reveal any significant difference between the participants of groups A and B with respect to the inferences evaluated. On the other hand, there is a significant difference between the results of the students in group A and those of group C with respect to the formulation of cohesion inferences. The interviews conducted with the 16 targeted participants indicate that students in group A elaborate more cohesive inferences than those in other groups. In the case of the inference of elaboration, the results are more mixed: the students of the group A formulate more this kind of inferences than the par-ticipants of the other groups, but those of the group B present a larger gap between the infer-ences formulated in the pre-test and those enunciated in the post-test. Finally, students in group A mentioned more strategies that are related to reciprocal teaching than the other stu-dents. In conclusion, although this study provides some information related to the role of re-ciprocal teaching in the development of reading comprehension and inference, more research is needed in order to propose efficient interventions to be implemented in regular classrooms in order to contribute to the development of students reading competency.

Keyphrases: Reading comprehension, Inference, Ordinary class, Reciprocal teaching