The quality of Franco-Albertan students’ fictional texts: A study on the influence of a preferential cognitive style and writing strategy scaffolding
The object of this study was to verify two hypotheses. The first was that a student’s preferential cognitive style, sequential or simultaneous, can negatively affect the imaginative fiction texts that he or she produces. According to the second, students having been exposed to the strategies assembled by Cavanagh (2007) and possessing a sequential or simultaneous preferential cognitive style would produce better texts than students having the same styles but not having been exposed to the same strategies. To test these hypotheses, we determined the preferential (sequential/simultaneous) cognitive style of 45 Franco-Albertan subjects, 33 boys and 12 girls, 9 and 10 years old, by means of the Épreuve verbale d’aptitudes cognitives (EVAC) elaborated by Flessas et Lussier (2003). In a pretest, the subjects were divided into two groups (experimental and control), both of which were asked to write fictional texts. Then, over a period of 12 weeks, only the experimental group subjects were taught the writing strategies assembled by Cavanagh (2007) and lastly (in the post-test), the members of both groups were asked to compose a second fictional text. None of the results relative to the two hypotheses of the present study correspond to our expectations. Finally, we propose some promising avenues of research in this area that would avoid certain methodological pitfalls that we encountered.