La littératie administrative, un concept à exploiter pour améliorer les services publics

Administrative literacy represents the skillset needed to successfully carry out an administrative process (Döring, 2021), such as the driving license exchange. In Quebec, newly arrived immigrant citizens are required by the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ) to exchange their original driving license for a Quebec one, among other procedures. Newly arrived immigrant are vulnerable citizens (Roy, 2010), and they were left out when the Quebec government embarked on a major project to simplify communications after passing the Public Administration Act. However, to ensure a better understanding of the message it seeks to convey, the SAAQ should consider the context in which the communication takes place as well as the users to whom the message is addressed. After interviewing workers in newcomers’ centers, enabling us to create an experience map, we found that they’re often playing the part of literacy mediators (Papen, 2010) whose role is to bridge the gap between the immigrants’ literacy levels and those required by the Quebec administration. However, their roles’ parameters remain to be defined. Their training seems incomplete and the SAAQ responsibility is not sufficiently marked. By pursuing our master’s project further, we shed light on the multiple possibilities carried out by such a research project, thus, emphasizing the social relevance.