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Communication dans un congrès Année : 2010

Written Narrative in French Adults who are Functionally Illiterate : Linguistic Features and Discourse Organization

Résumé

Purpose: This study investigated the nature and extent of language difficulties encountered during text production by adults who are functionally illiterate (A-IL). Functional illiteracy refers to individuals who do not sufficiently master reading and writing for professional and social use despite having attended school, and who therefore have only very limited access to written language. We undertook a systematic analysis of text discourses produced by an extensive sample of adult literacy students during a narrative task regarded as a written communication situation, where participants had to implement both lexico-syntactic linguistic rules and discourse organization abilities in a decontextualized and distanced form of expression.
Method: Fifty adult literacy students and 50 reading level-matched pupils in 1st to 3rd grades produced a narrative based on a sequence of pictures featuring a cast of three protagonists. The narratives were produced through a dictation procedure for an absent recipient who would have to read the written story. During the dictation, the examiner acted only as a transcriber, offering no help beyond simply recording the narrator’s words, and re-reading the text back to the narrator. All narratives were transcribed in their entirety and coded in terms of linguistic features and discourse organization and content.
Results: At the linguistic level, A-IL produced longer narratives than children but they scored the same as the children on lexical diversity and obtained lower scores on morphosyntactic rules and syntactic complexity. At the level of discourse organization, A-IL scored more poorly than the children on narrative schema, their narratives lacking information about goals and causal connections. In contrast, they produced more evaluative devices to express their point of view, and to capture the attention of the reader.
Conclusions: We conclude that adults with low literacy performed differently from the reading level-matched children on written narrative, suggesting that A-IL have impaired abilities in text production in addition to problems at the transcription level, especially in controlling morphosyntax and global coherence. These impairments may be responsible for their difficulties to deal with written language. These results have practical implications for teaching written language to adult learners.
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halshs-02542240, version 1 (14-04-2020)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-02542240 , version 1

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Victor Millogo, Elsa Eme. Written Narrative in French Adults who are Functionally Illiterate : Linguistic Features and Discourse Organization. SIG Writing Conference 2010, European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI), Sep 2010, Heidelberg, Germany. ⟨halshs-02542240⟩
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