Development of revision and drafting in narrative and expository texts written by French children and adolescents (El desarrollo de la revisión y redacción de los textos narrativos y expositivos escritos por niños y adolescentes franceses)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Revisions in writing aim at text improvement. Literature has shown that revision activity differs between novice and experienced writers. Our ultimate goal is to understand how children and adolescents develop the capacity to shift perspectives from language producer to language recipient — a prerequisite ability to successful revision. In this study we analyse draft and final versions of expository and narrative texts produced by French children (36 participants for each group: fifth, seventh and ninth grades). Half of the children produced the written texts after having produced the text first in the spoken modality, and the other half produced the written versions before producing the text in the spoken modality. We will examine the kinds of revisions made by children and adolescents and how they vary with development and across text types. We also want to evaluate the measure to which our writers’ revisions contribute to text quality and to show how revisions can reveal what elements our participants judge as playing a part in text quality.