Compétences narratives et communicatives chez des personnes en situation d’illettrisme

Abstract

The purpose of the article is the study of the nature and extent of oral language difficulties suffered by those people who are in a situation of functional illiteracy, in relation to their reading abilities. We are aiming at providing a systematic analysis of narrations delivered by an extensive sample of illiterate adults, in a standardized narration task considered as a communication situation, implementing at the same time lexicosyntaxic rules on the one hand and pragmatic skills of producing linguistic forms in relation to a given context, intentions and mutual expectations, on the other. Fifty-two illiterate men and women, along with a control group comparable with regards to age, sex and socioprofessional environment, delivered a narration from a sequence of pictures casting three protagonists of the same gender for an absent receiver. All narrations were integrally transcripted and coded using two sets of measurements: (1) structural ones (lexical diversity, morphologic errors, syntax complexity) and (2) pragmatic ones (evaluative expressions, canonic scheme, referential cohesion). Results show a sizeable deficit of the illiterates with regards to the structural level (mainly the morphosyntax), with a large variability between subjects at the pragmatic level. Furthermore, the correlations show some relationships between the narrative skills and reading abilities, mainly at the morphosyntaxic level. These results are discussed in terms of reciprocal causality between the written and oral languages and for their implications in the education of adults in written language.