«C’est illisible ? Simplifiez-le ! ». Évaluer la compréhension d’un texte à partir de la reformulation par des apprenants de FLE

The main goal of this article is to examine the possibility of evaluating the comprehension of a text through its rewording and to set out a typology of the strategies of reformulation intended to serve as comprehension pointers. In order to do this, Italian-speaking students of French were asked to rewrite and simplify a very complex administrative text in the medical field. Rewriting activity is ideally carried out through two discursive operations, namely paraphrasing and summarising; following the example of Adam (1990) who describes paraphrasing as a "paraphrastic rewording", we propose to consider summarising as a “non-paraphrastic rewording.”. Our analysis reveals that although learners mostly did patchwriting, they also used three principle strategies: erasing information they considered as secondary or redundant, reworking the text on a graphic level, and paraphrasing a small number of sentences. While paraphrasing undeniably made it possible to measure their degree of comprehension, the other strategies were equally considered as valid criteria for assessing text intelligibility. Despite the learners' obvious attempt to overcome the difficulties associated with their lack of linguistic competence, their simplified approach nevertheless revealed their textual understanding and, correlatively, the degree of complexity of the proposed text.