Word problems of a given structure in the perspective of teacher training

International audienceThe paper reports on the results of a research study fo-cusing on how to train prospective teachers for guiding their pupils through the process of solving word problems. The teaching experiment involved prospective teachers' work with graphical representations called branched chains to solve and pose word problems. The paper shows the difficulties the students were facing, presents ideas from discussions during joint reflection, tries to describe the changes in the students' skills and attitudes. It also points at the differences between prospective primary and secondary mathematics teachers