Narrative and Descriptive Text Revising Strategies and Procedures

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 Scardamalia 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,