160 A. PIOLAT & J.-Y. ROUSSEY
Thble 1
Distribution of subjects according to wether or not they improved the text and/or followed
one of the model procedures, by age, text type, and degree of expertise.
|
Subjects |
Text type |
Expertise |
Improved text |
Incomplete |
N | ||||
|
Observed strategy |
No observed | ||||||||
|
S.S |
L.G.S. G.L.S. |
Total | |||||||
|
E- |
1 |
2 |
1 |
4 |
1 |
7 |
12 | ||
|
Narrative |
E + |
7 |
1 |
O |
8 |
2 |
2 |
12 | |
|
E- & E + |
8 |
3 |
1 |
12 |
3 |
9 | |||
|
Adults |
E- |
O |
2 |
O |
2 |
3 |
7 |
12 | |
|
Description |
E + |
2 |
4 |
1 |
7 |
5 |
O |
12 | |
|
E- & E + |
2 |
6 |
1 |
9 |
8 |
7 | |||
|
Tbtal |
10 |
9 |
2 |
21 |
11 |
16 |
48 | ||
|
E- |
1 |
O |
O |
1 |
O |
11 |
12 | ||
|
Narrative |
E + |
O |
4 |
O |
4 |
7 |
1 |
12 | |
|
E- & E + |
1 |
4 |
O |
5 |
7 |
12 | |||
|
Children |
E- |
O |
O |
O |
O |
2 |
10 |
12 | |
|
Description |
E + |
1 |
1 |
O |
2 |
4 |
6 |
12 | |
|
E- & E+ |
1 |
1 |
O |
2 |
6 |
16 | |||
|
Tbtal |
2 |
5 |
O |
7 |
13 |
28 |
48 | ||
|
Adults and Children |
12 |
14 |
2 |
28 |
24 |
44 |
96 | ||
|
Note. E+ = |
more expert; E- |
= less expert | |||||||
The global-then-local Strategy (G.L.S.) was not used.
For the narrative, the Simultaneous Strategy (S.S.) was most often used by adults, whereas
the Local-then-Global Strategy (L.G.S) was used more by children. For the description, more
adults used the Local-then-Global Strategy (L.G.S), while only two of the expert children
used any one of the model strategies.
It looks as though adults revised by relying on their textual knowledge, proceeding step
by step in a linear fashion in order to simultaneously find and solve all of the linguistic
problems diagnosed in a single pass through the text. The Simultaneous Strategy (S.S.) may
be particularly well suited to monitoring the highly restricted order of the statements in
narrative texts, which adults master well. When confronted with a description, however, adults
may have more difficulty predicting their final product at the beginning of task execution.
Thus, although for some of the adults, a single pass through the text was sufficient, others
required several in-order passes to arrive at the desired improvement. For both the narrative
and the description, the adults did not find it useful to revise the overall structure of the
text as long as the statements themselves were syntactically or semantically unacceptable.
The children (even the experts) were not able to reestablish the correct structure of the
description, with which they appear to be unfamiliar. They essentially made local corrections
(see Piolat, Roussey, & Farioli, 1987). It was therefore not possible to attribute one of the
theoretical strategies to these subjects. To improve the narrative, although children at this
age have sufficient mastery of the narrative superstructure, even the experts were not