This proposal explores the specific and the generic patterns in the process of teaching/learning the writing of historical narratives, respectively in French language classroom and history classroom. In the stream of the French"disciplinary didactiques" (Caillot 2007), this research aims at comparing the teaching and learning practices of a knowledge content which is related to distinctive disciplines. On the basis that « the transactions in educational practices are inevitably specified by the knowledge taught » (Mercier, Schubauer-Leoni & Sensevy, 2002), we regard the writing of historical narratives as a revealing medium of the enacted disciplinary traditions that are embedded in the western Swiss curriculum for primary school. Examining the domain-specific research landscape in education as it developed in the last decade, Stevens, Wineburg, Herrenkohl & Bell (2005) question the taken-for-granted boundaries around single subject matters, in which the same "words" may be used (such as "causes" and "evidence" respectively in science and history) but leading to a different conceptualization in each case. They suggest that comparative studies of school subject matter practices are required to account for the students understanding of disciplines and supporting the building of similarities and difference among the contents of those practices. In our view, the double location of the writing of historical narratives as a textual genre in the French class and as a practice of the historical method in the history class is also an interesting spot for studying the connections between disciplines from the teacher and the students' standpoint.

Against the background of social-interactionnism, we approach the study of didactical transactions of the teacher, students and knowledge as a triadic system (Schubauer-Leoni & Leutenegger, 2002). This system is studied dynamically with the lenses provided by the didactical contract (Brousseau, 1997) and the didactical transposition process (Chevallard, 1985/1991, 1988; Schneuwly, 1998). In particular, we consider that the shaping of the knowledge content in classroom practices is the result of a joint action of the teacher and students, that is to say, a continuous adjustment individual actions with respect to a common ground, by integrating the perspectives of others (Blumer, 2004). According to the Joint Action Theory in Didactics (Sensevy, Mercier, Schubauer-Leoni Ligozat & Perrot, 2005; Sensevy & Mercier (eds), 2007; Ligozat & Schubauer-Leoni, 2010), the dynamics of the meaning making-process (mesogenesis, topogenesis and chronogenesis) is related to the structures of the teacher's participation (define, devolve, regulate and institutionalize) in the joint action. In this contribution the study of the learning progression (chronogenesis) takes a greater importance since we expect some memory effects to occur between distinctive disciplinary teaching sequences taking place successively in the same classroom.

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