In our more and more globalized society, in which people of diverse nationalities are increasingly asked to communicate together, the need to understand a foreign culture is becoming more and more important, and this skill is partly to be developed at school. Our paper presents the primary results of exploratory research on the implementation of foreign language and culture teaching units in primary school classrooms in France. We particularly focus on how the cultural elements of a foreign country are taken into account and developed by teachers in their foreign language teaching units.

In order to describe the learning situations set up by the teachers, we use to two types of conceptual backgrounds.We 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? References to researchers like Puren and Zarate help explain what cultural competences in a primary school class can consist of. These references, like others (Aden, Cain, Hall), 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, also enables us to characterize the teachers and students’ action in classes.

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