THE EFFECTS OF ‘CONCEPT MAPPING ’ ON SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS' COMPREHENSION OF INFORMATIVE TEXT

Abstract. Numerous empirical studies in first language education have highlighted the positive effects of concept mapping as an instructional strategy for text comprehension (Chang et al., 2002). However, in the context of second language, such research has remained limited. The present study aims at observing the effects of an instructional sequence, based on the most effective approaches tested in first languages, on informative text comprehension in French as a second language. Within the framework of this pilot research, the adult French second language learners of an advanced level from the language school of the ‘Université du Québec à Montréal ’ were subject to a weekly intervention over a 4 week period, while a control group equivalent followed the traditional approach (explanation of new words and expressions, discussion of the key concepts). Before reading an informative text, participants in the experimental group were invited to collaboratively replace the labels in a Fill-in Concept Map. Then, after reading the text, the participants were asked to correct it individually. Over the course of the 4 weeks, we used the instructional strategy of the progressive devolution concept map, which is an approach to scaffold fading. The results obtained with comprehension questionnaires on the reading text specific to each meeting indicated that the experimental group obtained a better performance than the group that had used the traditional approach.