Describing and understanding of the teaching practices of reading: an approach by the «genres d’activité scolaire»

Abstract

Based on a socio-historical approach to didactics, our contribution aims to present the steps of a comprehensive research process implicating the reduction of a major audiovisual data collection. Yet this process itself produces a description of teaching practices. Based on semi-experimental research that involves the reading of literary and non literary texts in four secondary classrooms, our contribution puts emphasis on the influence of the length and the status of the texts on the contents, i.e. the taught «object». More generally, we will show that the concept of «genre d’activité scolaire» is a descriptive and comprehensive tool of the dynamic of the «object» as it is shown, negotiated and constructed in the classroom.