The evidence-based methodology used in fields like medicine has recently influenced educational research and policies in several countries. Transferring an evidence-based methodological research developed in medicine to the field of education, and more particularly to the field of the didactics of foreign languages and cultures, raises many questions. Indeed, social facts are not as simple to evaluate as medical facts (even if social facts exist in medical research). Is it possible to bring to light “what works” to make students develop cultural competences? Our presentation will start from this statement: in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, the discovery of a foreign culture is said to contribute to the development of linguistic competences (and vice versa). Consequently, collecting and analysing data that can produce evidence of cultural competences represents an interesting step towards the understanding of how elementary school students build cultural references and intercultural skills. We will show how we proceeded to get as much evidence as possible of cultural skills among English learners by presenting the results of: - a qualitative research conducted among five French fourth grade classes in 2009 - a quantitative study based on questionnaires and conducted among 100 classes. We will refer to theories used in the didactics of foreign languages and cultures and discuss the key notion of culture: what does it mean for teachers, for students? How can cultural competences be defined at school? References to researchers like Puren and Zarate will help explain what a foreign culture in an elementary class can consist of. These references, with others like Aden, Cain, will also enable us to show that linguistic systems are indissociable from cultural universes. The recourse to the didactics of mathematics, particularly to the “joint action” theory developed by Sensevy, Mercier and Schubauer-Leoni, will enable us to characterize the teachers and students’ action in classes.

Developing cultural knowledge is said to be a matter of reflection and capacity to understand cultural elements. Different types of data have been collected to get some empirical evidence of this. Thanks to transcriptions and synopses of lessons reconstructed from video recordings, we study some significant episodes and examine how cultural elements are set up by the teachers and actually taken in and understood by the learners. The other fundamental element of our methodology is constituted of the analysis of about 100 questionnaires for teachers. These questionnaires have been analysed so as to make emerge as much evidence as possible of the way students develop their foreign linguistic and cultural competences. They included scenarios of teachers’ practice, in reference to which they had to situate their own practice. The scenarios have been built on former observations of classes, on our own teaching experience and in reference to our theoretical tools.

Getting consistent evidence of learners’ cultural skills is very complex because of the general disagreement about what these skills really consist of. Consequently, our wealth of data did not constitute clear evidence as it was difficult to leave the social context aside the process of teaching and learning a foreign culture and not to be oriented by what we believed cultural competences should be like. Yet we got some clues of how intercultural skills are developed by the students thanks to the crossing of quantitative and qualitative methods. The use of both methods was also essential to finely appreciate the nature of these skills. To conclude, we will underline the essential role of an active research community as we think that getting evidence requires acknowledging scientific theories developed by other researchers.