Many psycholinguistic and ergonomic studies on procedural texts have, directly or indirectly, addressed the question of the effect of information order on user's processing. Results obtained in these studies gave rise to three general conclusions : (1) the way procedural texts are read, understood and their instructions followed depends on information order ; (2) initial mention of the main information (i. e. superordinate information) in texts, information blocks and sentences facilitates the processing of the text ; (3) the order of information effect depends on multiple factors such as : users' strategies, users' prior knowledge, referent and situation structures.

The notions of term and lexical unity (LU) are marked by the theoretical paradigm (t : terminological; l linguistic) in which they are conceptualized, the latter being itself defined inside its own discipline (Terminology or Linguistics). Contrary to an idea commonly held about Terminology and terminology in Linguistics - seen as a set of terms - considered as stabilisation and classification structures for concepts, the identity of term is extremely unstable. It is dependent on the conceptualization of LU made by each discipline. Relatively to the classic theory of terms (T,t), to its reconsideration (T,l) or to its appropriation by Linguistics (L,l), the notion of term is a construct which results from more or less controlled theoretical transfers, shifts or confusions.

This article focusses on the acquisition of discourse strategies by foreign students learning French. The study is based on a corpus of business letters written by Norwegian students. Our aim is to demonstrate how many of the mistakes that occur in this particular genre are due to the fact that even advanced students tend to misinterpret discourse contexts and as a consequence, fail to choose the correct discours strategy. Whereas grammatical mistakes will be considered by the addressee as being due to a poor command of the language and therefore easily forgiven, a bad choice of discourse strategy will often be interpreted as a manifestation of impoliteness or servility.