The article presents the first results of a research that started in September 2020 which aims to characterize the state and evolution of the historical literacy of students enrolled in a Secondary IV Quebec and Canada history course. Literacy being understood as the ability to understand and communicate information within the framework of a field of knowledge (history, in this case) (Martel, 2018; Nokes, 2013), we are looking and analyzing its manifestations in the written productions of the pupils from two angles: the use of documents and the production of historical texts. The analysis of student productions illustrates that the historical literacy being developed shows significant shortcomings, including a difficulty to mobilize historical documents in the construction of coherent historical interpretations and to write texts that account for place, time and causality.