Application d’une typologie des défauts de cohérence textuelle a l’analyse des productions écrites d’apprenants de troisième année secondaire

Abstract

One of the difficulties that are mostly reported by teachers of French as a Foreign Language is the ability of their learners to structure their writing, manage how to retrieve information, and control the techniques that contribute to improving texts and achieving coherence. Even though these learners manage to produce correct sentences, they are still unable to write a whole text as juxtaposing sentences is never enough to have a coherent text. Therefore, text grammarians felt the necessity to go beyond the sentence unit and deal with the text unit. They devised for that purpose a set of techniques that permit identifying and spotting the problems that create breaches in the text unity as well as finding the most appropriate solutions. The work aims at applying a typology of the problems related to text coherence, which was elaborated by L. Pepin, to the written production of pupils in their final year of the secondary school. Using such techniques, text coherence errors in these writings will be spotted and analysed. Conditions for text coherence: all the key elements contributing to text coherence such as cohesion, the organization of units into hierarchy, and integration will be dealt with by introducing and describing the various categories and subcategories that make it up. Such a methodology provides interesting prospects for the pedagogy of writing: the implementation of the techniques brought out of the typology will be of great benefit to the teachers of French as a Foreign Language during their training not only as a means of assessing but also of teaching text coherence.