“Improving students’ punctuation: classroom experimentation and results in texts by primary and secondary school students in Quebec” is published in Didactiques.
Abstract:
The texts of primary and secondary school studentsshow a high proportion of written errors related to punctuation (Boivin and Pinsonneault, 2018, among others). Yet punctuation instruction often offers students only limited opportunities to improve their control of sign usage in a writing context (Riverin and Dufour, 2018). This article presents a quasi-experimental study involving 16 French classes from cycle 3 of primary school and cycle 1 of secondary school in Quebec (age 10 to 13). Students in the experimental groups carried out a sequence of 20 activities implementing three innovative didactic devices, designed during a first phase of the research, in collaboration with theparticipatingteachers. The aim was to improve punctuation and syntax in writing. We will present results drawn from the analysis of short texts written at pre-test and post-test (two texts at each time: one descriptive and one narrative) in the experimental and control groups, in relation to success variables in segmentation into graphic sentences (capitalletter & full stop), and in punctuation within graphic sentences and syntactic sentences (clauses, i.e. subject + predicate (+ sentence adverbial(s)), for some comma usage rules.