The development of digital contexts has brought two major changes to the reading of texts: on the one hand, digital materialities tend to blur the contexts of production, making it difficult to identify sources and to elaborate referential coherences; on the other hand, these materialities have facilitated the editing of multimodal texts combining several semiotic systems (Kress, 2010). Complex texts, be they digital or not, allowing to inform oneself about different questions, without paper materiality, circulate today on a global scale without filter or instructions (IFÉ, 2020). Public authorities are rightly concerned and are pushing for the development of tools to ensure that students and teachers have systematic and explicit skills in dealing with documentary texts.

In the classroom, the (digital) documentary text seems to be the ideal tool for structuring teaching that organizes learning to read and accompanies students in their exposure to contemporary texts. Its typed macrostructure, centered on an object of knowledge of the world, and its multimodal surface make it a privileged tool for working on the reading project, the linking of personal encyclopedic knowledge with the referential coherence of the text, inferences linked to the activation or not of hyperlinks, etc. Several models of digital documentary text comprehension already exist that highlight the encoding and cognitive processing of referential coherence (Rouet, 2012, 2013; Renaud, 2020; Desiron, 2020). However very little of this research focuses on the reasoned and temporal organization of their teaching. It seems that the question of production’s exercises and tasks, in particular, deserves to be explored further.

The teams brought together in this symposium are working on the didactic modeling and on the development of teaching tools for teachers in the domain of documentary texts. The work following different research paradigms, but all of them aim at developping and testing teaching sequences in real class-room situations in public primary and secondary schools. They all collaborate with teachers in order to construct these teaching tools and to use them. The teaching sequences are observed in order to test their efficiency and to adapt the tools. This common background allows interesting comparisons and discussions.

The differences between the research topics will allow to enrich the discussions.

The first paper by Martel, Boutin and Lacelle is based on a large project of elaborating digital contexts for an important editor, in collaboration with teachers. This material, that contains didactic tools, was tested with students in classroom experiences in order to define which tools/devices/tasks are most promising for accompanying the teaching of reception of digital youth documentaries.

The second paper, by Séverine De Croix, analyses the training, of a metacognitive type, aiming at familiarization with the uses and characteristics of documentary texts. The prototypes were already tested in more than 80 classes and the question asked is to know how, on the basis of the experiments conducted, to adapt the tasks given in order to better the prototype tested.

The third paper, by Christophe Ronveaux and Vincent Capt,  describes the first step of a design-based research that aims at developing tools for teaching digital documentary texts. The prototype developed with teachers is tested in two contexts: two transitions in compulsory school in order to observe the transformations and the invariants in the use of the prototype.

The differences of the three papers from the point of view of advancement of the research, of the documentary texts observed, of the research paradigm used will be the starting point of the discussions between the three teams and with the interested researchs.

Desiron, J. (2020). Designing multimedia documents for struggling readers : effects of text cohesion with static or animated depictions. Doctoral thesis in educational sciences. Université de Genève. IFÉ (2020). Effets du confinement sur l’activité des enseignants et des professionnels de l’enseignement. Premiers résultats. Lyon : ENS Lyon. Récupéré sur le site de l’IFE de http://ife.ens- lyon.fr/ife/recherche/groupes-de-travail/enquete-ife-sur-enseignement-et- confinement/premier-resultats-enquete-2020/cr Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality. A Social-Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. Routledge Falmer. Renaud, J. (2020). Évaluer l’utilisabilité, l’utilité et l’acceptabilité d’un outil didactique au cours du processus de conception continuée dans l’usage. Cas d'un outil pour l'enseignement de la lecture de textes documentaires numérique. Éducation et didactique, 14, 65-84. Rouet, J.-F. (2012). Ce que l‘usage d’internet nous apprend sur la lecture et son apprentissage. Le français aujourd’hui, 178, 55-64. Rouet, J.-F. (2013). Les spécificités de la lecture numérique. Repéré sur le site de Doc pour Docs, Entretien du 21 novembre 2013. URL : www.docpourdocs.fr/spip.php?article528-nh1