Search

International audience; Several nonlanguage factors influence literacy development, and motor skills are among those most studied. Despite the publication of several studies that have supported the existence of this relationship, the type of influence and underlying mechanisms have been little explored. Herein, we propose modeling the relationship between motor skills and literacy through structural equation modeling, testing the contribution of executive functions and handwriting skills as the possible mediators of this relationship. In a study of 278 third-grade children, we used a wide range of measures related to written language (reading, spelling, reading comprehension, and written production), fine motor skills (dominant hand, nondominant hand, and bimanual dexterity), executive functions (verbal and visuospatial working memory, inhibition, and shifting), and handwriting. Structural equation modeling of the relationship between these different variables indicated that in the third grade, the influence of fine motor skills on literacy is fully mediated by both executive functions and handwriting skills. These motor skills effects are observed for both low levels of processing (reading, spelling) and high levels of processing (reading comprehension, written production). The results are discussed in terms of the potential mechanisms underlying different literacy skills and their implications for pedagogical programs.

International audience; This study examines the development of source evaluation skills in four groups of students from 10 to 19 years of age. We designed a set of tasks based on a distinction between three components of source evaluation: the identification of source parameters; the evaluation of source features such as the source’s competence or benevolence under explicit instructions; and the use of source features in assessing a document’s relevance with respect to a given task. This inventory was administered to 245 teenagers in grades 5, 7 and 9 and to undergraduate students. All types of source evaluation skills developed throughout adolescence, with some of them remaining suboptimal for older readers. Furthermore, we found weak relationships between students’ identification of source parameters and their use of source features in the absence of any specific prompt. Finally, source evaluation tasks were weakly related to teenagers’ word reading skills. Taken together, these results document teenagers’ acquisition of source evaluation skills and warrant a distinction between readers’ ability to comprehend source features and to use these features when assessing information quality.

International audience; This paper discusses the skills required for students to be able to access, comprehend and use documents independently, both in print and online. We start with a simple example in order to illustrate the demands posed by document-based school tasks on students’ reading literacy skills. We then propose a descriptive framework to broaden the construct of reading literacy so as to account for document processes, including search, evaluation and multiple-text integration. We review some studies illustrating the challenges of these processes for primary school students, and we discuss extant research investigating the effectiveness of instructional interventions.; En este artículo se discuten las capacidades y habilidades que los estudiantes necesitan para poder acceder, comprender y utilizar documentación de manera independiente, tanto impresa como digital. Comenzamos con un ejemplo sencillo para ilustrar las exigencias de las tareas escolares basadas en la inspección documental para estudiantes de un curso de capacidad lectora. A continuación, proponemos un marco descriptivo para ampliar el constructo de capacidad lectora de modo que abarque los procesos de documentación, entre los que se incluye la búsqueda, evaluación e integración de diversos materiales textuales. Revisamos algunos estudios que han ilustrado las dificultades con las que los estudiantes de educación primaria se encuentran durante estos procesos y discutimos distintas investigaciones en curso sobre la eficacia de algunas intervenciones pedagógicas.

International audience; This article presents two studies investigating the role of executive functioning in written text comprehension in children and adolescents. In a first study, the involvement of executive functions in reading comprehension performance was examined in normally developing children in fifth grade. Two aspects of text comprehension were differentiated: literal and inferential processes. The results demonstrated that while three aspects of executive functioning (working memory, planning, and inhibition processes) were significantly predictive of the performance on the inferential questions of the comprehension test, these factors did not predict the scores on the literal tasks of the test. In a second experiment, the linguistic and cognitive profiles of children in third/fifth and seventh/ninth grades with a specific reading comprehension deficit were examined. This analysis revealed that the deficits experienced by the less skilled comprehenders in both the linguistic and the executive domains could evolve over time. As a result, linguistic factors do not make it possible to distinguish between good and poor comprehenders among the group of older children, whereas the difficulties relating to executive processing remain stable over development. These findings are discussed in the context of the need to take account of the executive difficulties that characterize less skilled comprehenders of any age, especially for remediation purposes.

International audience; The purpose of this study was to examine the differential impact of a computer‐based comprehension training programme according to second graders' comprehender profiles. These profiles differed in the children's abilities to process three types of textual information: literal information, text‐connecting inferences and gap‐filling inferences. The results showed that all the profiles improved significantly after the training on the question type that had caused them the greatest amount of difficulty on the pretest. In addition, factors that could a priori predict the effectiveness of the programme were investigated by comparing children who benefited from the instruction (responders) with those who did not benefit (nonresponders). Before instruction, these children differed in their lexical knowledge level and logical reasoning skills, but not in their memory or comprehension‐monitoring abilities. The results support the claim that children with comprehension difficulties form a heterogeneous group and emphasize the need to examine the differential impact of comprehension instruction according to the characteristics of poor comprehenders.

International audience; Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that sentence processing is an essential mediatory skill between word recognition and text comprehension in reading. In Experiment 1, a semantic similarity judgement task was used with children from Grade 2 to Grade 9. They had to say whether two written sentences had the same (or very similar) meanings or whether the meanings of the two sentences were very different. As expected, performance improved with age both on the high‐frequency words and with increasingly complex sentences. In Experiment 2 with children in Grade 3, scores in written sentence comprehension and vocabulary made the most important unique contribution to the reading comprehension of an expository text. The results are discussed first, in the light of a general framework in which sentence‐level skill is at the core of reading comprehension and second, with reference to the issue of reading assessment.