Abstract

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a didactic sequence for writing imaginary stories on 9-year-old Franco-Albertan and New Brunswick Acadian students’ ability to compose coherent narrative texts. In this article, we report on the qualitative results obtained in the case studies of 8 students that we observed and then interviewed on the subject of their appropriation of text-planning strategies. We measured the macrostructural, microstructural and situational coherence of the pre-test draft versions (Text 1) and two texts completed during the intervention of 53 experimental group and 35 control group students evenly divided between the two provinces involved. The analysis of these qualitative results reveals that the planning strategies presented allowed the 8 experimental-group students to gain a greater appreciation of the complexity of the writing process and, apparently, a greater ability to manage this process. At the same time, the inter- and intra-group deviation analyses indicate that both groups improved the macrostructural coherence of their texts but that the experimental group’s improvement is significantly better that the control group’s. The results for microstructural and situational coherence are less significant.