ABSTRACT
Since 2001, the Didactext research group has explored the relationships between writing and school from the perspective of writing across the curriculum and/or heuristic writing (what some call “writing to learn”). They are particularly interested in relating production contexts and cognitive processes with the linguistic and textual regularities of academic writing. This study focused on children in the final year of elementary education (sixth grade of elementary school). Upon finishing this school year, at age 12, children go on to finish compulsory secondary education at a “high school” (for four years, from age 12 to 16). The Didactext Group, in researching at this final elementary school year, had a double goal: to observe writing practices that were carried out in the classroom, and to design a didactic sequence to improve expository texts, which the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment of the Organization for European Cooperation and Development 2000, 2003, 2006) reported were the kind of texts that were most in demand at high school, though the least used by the pupils. The Didactext Group used as a starting point the hypothesis that, if the processes that are involved in the production of written texts (planning-textualization-revision) were made explicit and practiced in class, the students’ written competence would improve. This chapter presents first the theoretical foundations of the model of didactic intervention used by the Didactext Group. This model is based on classroom work that is organized into didactic sequences, the activities of which guide the writing process, beginning with planning the writing, all the way through revising and editing for the final draft. Second, it offers details of the objectives and characteristics of the investigation carried out by the group and, third, it provides the most relevant results obtained. The final conclusions point toward several pedagogical implications derivable from the didactic intervention in sixth-grade classrooms.
