Contenu du sommaire : Les discours procéduraux, sous la direction de Claudine Garcia-Debanc

Many genres of discourse offer instructional and procedural semantic and pragmatic features which are expressed by common linguistic forms. Considering such regularities, one may be induced to treat them as a category or a type of text. As the article presents some of the common characteristics shared by recipes, assembly instructions, topographical guides, horoscopes and the tip columns that can be found in magazines, it shows that those permanent features are directly generated by the genres. Therefore they fall within the field of discourse analysis and not within that of a text grammar or a text typology.

This paper concerns the organisation of text and its surface signalling. It sets out a theoretical framework based on Halliday's functional theory of language, Mann & Thompson's RST, Virbel's Model of Text Architecture and Charolle's discourse frames. After a discussion of the bases for classifying texts in genres and types, it provides some detailed analyses of software manuals, which illustrate the need to envisage their organisation as a complex structure of interconnected levels. These illustrative analyses lead to an extended conception of the notion of marker of text organisation, which includes visual as well as lexical and syntactic markers. They also provide some directions for the articulation of levels of organisation through an attempt to relate the different models of text.

In processing procedural documents, two steps obviously exist: inspection of instructions and execution of actions. This paper is concerned by mental activities linking these two steps. For some authors, comprehension of instructions involves two sub-processes: construction of a situational representation and elaboration of an action plan. The first sub-process is aimed at coordinating information provided by the text, the pictures, the device and the user's knowledge base. This preliminary sub-process would be a prerequisite for the subsequent sub-process: elaboration of action plan. This article reports a study aimed at investigating these processes. The presented results established the special importance of the verbal system in the comprehension of procedural instructions, particularly in action planning. In addition, results showed that presenting text together with pictures improve comprehension in comparison with pictures or text alone.

In this paper, we argue that procedural text processing (i.e., texts about procedures: leaflets, operating instructions, usable texts) must be studied by taking into account simultaneously theories and results of discourse psychology, psycholinguistics, psychology of learning and ergonomics. Two levels must be considered. At a global level, procedural text processing can be described as a social bipolar situated constrained process. At a local level, understanding and operating instructions can be viewed as a complex understanding-learning process, that is, as a knowledge transforming process in which an external declarative linguistic representation, the text, is transformed into procedural knowledge and /or actions.

We report the results of two experiments intended to study the effect of text format (compact, structured, logigramme) on the visual browsing of the instructions, the realisation of the actions and their memorising. For a same duration of realisation of the task, one often notes that more the structuring of the text increases more the acquisition of visual information decreases. This suggests that the format of the procedural text can reinforce the perception of the causal structure of the problem. However, the results obtained on the level of the acquisition of information vary according to the problem to solve and the results concerning the recall of the instructions do not show any effect of text format.

The experimental study has been conducted with children 9 years old, 12 years old and adults about comprehension of rules of games. The study tries to answer to different questions. How does text architecture influence text comprehension and recall? Which formatting is most efficient in terms of comprehension? in terms of recall? in terms of selective retrieval? From the ontogenetic point of view, when do children become capable of identifying markers of text constituents such as titles or enumerations? The data collected confirm the hypothesis that layout influences comprehension and recall for all groups.Visuo-spatial formatting is better for selective retrieval while discursive formatting is better for recall.

Two experiments on reading of procedural texts are described with the purpose to show the role of organisational /spatial layout (Title, paragraph marks. ..) on encoding strategies during reading. The first experiment used reading times and the second was an eye tracking study. Globally, the results show that the presence of a organisational layout on procedural texts (games rules) induced a hierarchic encoding of text information, it would facilitate the global coherence process needed for information integration. This hierarchic encoding strategy is elaborated at the beginning of reading when the text structure is available (text presented with a layout), reading time are longer on the first sentence. When the structure of the text is not available (justified text), the encoding strategy was rather temporal, text coherence would be established progressively during reading. The results are interpreted according to the Structure Building Framework Model (Gernsbacher, 1988) Mots-clés : Lecture, Stratégies, Mouvements de Yeux, Texte Procédural.