Mapping Coherence and Cohesion Skills in Written Texts Produced by 9- to 12-Year-Old French-Speaking Learners
Résumé
The present work is part of a crossed study of a large corpus of pupil texts (n= 400, 9-12 years old, 16 years old, students) triggered by a common instruction. It aims at establishing a cartography of indicators of textual competencies. In this chapter, we analyze 6 texts of 9 to 12 years old pupils responding to a sentence integration task: three sentences including pronominal anaphora and demonstrative noun phrases have to be integrated in a narrative text without modifications. The first results show that the integration of pronominal anaphors is easier than the integration of lexical expressions including a demonstrative determinant. The texts which succeed in integrating Demonstrative NP including lexical anaphora are the longest ones and have a title. Then, we study temporal structuration of the same 6 texts: we list the different verbal tenses used in each text, connectors and adverbial frames. These analyses show that the hierarchy of the texts from a coherence/cohesion point of view correspond to the scholar levels: younger pupils use cohesion markers better than older ones. Then, we compare two texts written by pupils of the same scholar level. They show very different competencies on using cohesion markers. The methodology experimented here on a small number of texts will serve as a guide to a bigger annotation campaign on a large corpus of pupil texts (n = 400).
