« On ne sait pas ce que ça veut dire, mais on le met quand-même »L’activité de lecture des élèves orientée vers une tâche de production en allemand langue étrangère

• Main Author: Marianne Jacquin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: ACEDLE 2016-12-01
• Series: Recherches en didactique des langues et des cultures
• Subjects: reading instruction; writing; foreign language; task-based approach; student’s activity
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/rdlc/1375

The research described in this article concerns the teaching and learning of reading in German as a foreign language to 2nd year students at the post-compulsory school level. It seeks to highlight the strategic approach of the students confronted with a task of reading two contrasting textual genres – an article and a short story – leading to a writing task. This open task draws on a task-based approach allowing the students to exercise their written linguistic skills as language "users". The article focuses more particularly on the nature of the links which the students make between the texts to be read and written. Of interest is whether the links are of the same nature in both text genres? The results show that the main impact of the writing task is that it incites students to adopt a "utilitarian" reading of the texts meaning that they focus on content elements and immediately exploitable forms.