Collaborative Reformulation and Writing in French as a Foreign Language
Résumé
Whether it is considered as a relationship of equivalence (Gülich and Kotschi 1987) or rather as a semantic relatedness, a "family resemblance" (Fuchs 1994), reformulation constitutes a restatement with modification which can have different purposes: to complete the first formulation, to clarify it (Rossari 1990), to make oneself better understood, or to find a more appropriate formulation which better corresponds to what one would like to express. In the last case it is a readjustment. These readjustments interest us here, and more particularly those necessary for writing a text in a foreign language. Fuchs (1994: 130) makes an interesting comparison between reformulation and the production of an utterance: "Constructing an utterance is always selecting a particular, unique configuration within a potential family of related utterances.” If writing a text amounts to producing a “sequence of self-reformulations” (ibid.), it can be hypothesised that learning to reformulate will improve one's writing skills.
In order to test this hypothesis, a research on reformulation was conducted with a multilingual group of L2 learners of French participating in a reading and writing course in France and who wish to start or continue higher education in this country. Phase 1 of the research aimed to analyse the reformulating utterances produced by these students and to collect their metacognitive comments on the reformulation activity. The analysis shows that students use a variety of reformulating operations, but encounter significant difficulties, particularly when it comes to transforming a sentence syntactically. In addition, most students feel that reformulating in a foreign language is a difficult activity and that they need to learn to reformulate. Phase 2 of the research therefore consisted in setting up reformulation practices involving individual and collaborative (in pairs) reformulation tasks. The corpus collected includes, in addition to the reformulating utterances produced by the students, the audio recording of their exchanges during the collaborative tasks as well as their answers to two questionnaires (at the beginning and end of the course). The purpose of this article is to present the first results of phase 2, in particular the analysis of the exchanges within the student pairs, which allows to observe the procedures they use to reformulate collaboratively. The method used is content analysis and transcription of selected extracts. We will focus on two aspects highlighted by the research: first, the important role played by the comprehension of the source utterance in the reformulating activity which shows that reformulation is the interface between reading (comprehension) and writing (production) and can play an important role in the development of literacy. On the other hand, there is a disparity between the pairs: while some really collaborate to carry out the reformulation task, it is much less the case for others. We will deduce the conditions under which collaboration can be an aid to reformulation.