The revision of syntactic errors related to complex sentences in French L1: strategies of secondary school advanced writers

Abstract

This article presents a description of the revision strategies targeting complex sentences of 16 secondary school advanced writers (15-17 years old) in the context of French L1 instruction. As the literature indi- cates, most errors in students’ texts are syntactic errors (Boivin & Pinsonneault, 2018), and re vising them entails a heavy cognitive load (Roussey & Piolat, 2008). We conducted a multiple case study among these advanced writers to identify their detection, diagnosis and correction strategies targeting syntactic problems. Thinking-aloud (Ericsson & Simon, 1993; Hayes & Flower, 1980), they revised one individual text and one experimental text containing 22 different syntactic errors related to complex sentences. We focused on the revision strategies leading to accurate changes. Our results show that advanced writers make a very limited use of detection strategies. Their diagnosis strategies are mainly reflections, grammaticality judgments and rereadings. Students with high rates of accurate changes in the experimental text use fewer diagnosis strategies than those with average rates. Self-questioning appears to be a strategy most used by students with high rates of accurate changes. The corrections are generally precise and made immediately after a problem is detected. Looking at individual cases, we also present salient profiles based on the students’ posture toward revision and syntax.