The name is absent

European Journal of Psychology of Education
1991, Vol. V1, n° 2, 155-163

© 1991, I.S.P.A.

Narrative and Descriptive Text
Revising Strategies and Procedures

Annie Piolat

JeanYves Roussey

Universite de Provence, Aix en Provence, France

Forty-eight children and forty-eight adults of contrasting degrees
of expertise made a series of corrections in order to improve a text
(narrative or description) in which three within-statement errors and
three between-statement errors had been inserted. Subjects used a
simplified word processor (SCRIPREV) which recorded all movements
of linguistic units

The purpose of this research was to study revising strategies by
examining the correction-sequencing procedures implemented by these
subjects. The procedures, which were coded in the form of time series,
were compared to the time series of model revising procedures (i.e.
effective ones) representing three strategies based on certain predefined
functional principles (linguistic level, execution order).

The adults used two of these strategies. the Simultaneous Strategy
for the narrative, and the Local-then-Global Strategy for the description.
The children used the Local-then-Global Strategy for the narrative, but
did not use any identifiable procedure to revise the description, which
they did not manage to totally improve in the expected manner.

The problem

S^card^amali^a and Bereiter (1985) assume that, in order to modify a text, writers must
read it for evaluation (compare), discover a difference between what they produced and what
they intended or were supposed to say (diagnose), and then make a correction (operate).

Many studies have stressed how complex this activity actually is, and have provided
evidence of substantial functional variations that depend on the age and degree of expertise
of the writers, or upon other contextual variables (task, text type, etc.). These variants have
been qualified as strategic. In our review (Piolat & Roussey, in press), the expression «revising
strategy» refers essentially to two levels of the revising activity:

The experiment reported in this article was conducted at the Centre de Recherche en Psychologie Cognitive, a
research unit affiliated with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France.

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