Activités cognitives et stratégies des apprenants face aux tâches d’« Expression écrite courte » de SELF japonais : étude à travers le Think Aloud Protocol

Tomoko Higashi, Université Grenoble Alpes, Chieko Shirota, Université Bordeaux Montaigne

Abstract: In response to the increasing need to assess students' Japanese language skills in French universities with a reliable online test based on the CEFR, we have developed the Japanese SELF placement test within the framework of the multilingual Innovalangues project (winning project of the IDEFI 2012-2020). In this survey, we are interested in observing the cognitive activities of students when they perform short writing tasks on the SELF test, which consist in selecting one or several words to complete sentences within a text. Using the think-aloud protocol with 6 students, we collected data to study how they try to understand the text and find the answers. In this paper, we will present the results obtained by focusing on 2 aspects: firstly, the way in which these students with different levels of Japanese (A1 to B1) read aloud and translate the text, and secondly, the strategies used by these students. On the one hand, the results of the analyses show us that the linguistic level impacts the way of reading and understanding the text written in Japanese, on the other hand, they reveal various strategies, such as the global comprehension of the context, and the mobilization of grammatical and lexical knowledge to find a correct answer.