La didactique de l'écriture: Les marqueurs de relation dans les cours de français du collégial
Abstract (summary)
The didactics of discourse markers in the French courses of Quebec colleges (Canada) relates to the teaching of writing. Discourse markers are a new course content in Quebec colleges, but the existing learning material only consists in lists and exercises for clause level or paragraph structuring. In the framework of Relevance Theory, discourse markers play mainly a pragmatic role, which means that they guide utterance interpretation and help the reader in context elaboration. They subdivide in three categories: connectives, continuity markers and modality markers. These categories are defined and characterizes in accordance with their pragmatic and linguistic properties. Essentially, discourse markers are morphemes or grammaticalized expressions that relate an utterance to context by the means of their inferential instructions. The notion of textual organizer is not considered valid from a didactical point of view. More than 1600 discourse markers are listed and classified in 44 uses, gathered around seven writing strategies.
A sample of 60 literary analysis and essays, written in French courses by college students, has been evaluated for the use of discourse markers and compared to texts written by experts. Results show that students use too much discourse markers, even if their variety is reduced, compared to the experts. Use is correct only in 68.5% of the cases. Too many markers anchor the paragraphs in the writing situation instead of focusing on what is said. These problems are related with the didactics of writing in the colleges' French courses.
We are recommending teaching strategies in reading and writing in order to integrate to the French courses of Quebec colleges the learning of discourse markers. Our didactical propositions consist in a model and an example of didactic sequence just as various types of exercises on discourse markers, from basic manipulations to text transformation.
Indexing (details)
Composition