Under the French national project “1000 video conferencing systems for primary schools”, a growing number of schools are being equipped of video conferencing systems. The assumption underlying this project is that, by putting students in a position to communicate with distant native speakers, it will enable them to improve their oral and socio-cultural skills. Indeed, by giving young learners the possibility to be in direct visual interaction with native speakers, it seems that video conferencing enhances mutual understanding and develops specific skills both on the students' and the teachers' sides. Yet trying to understand to what extent video conferencing affects teaching and learning strategies raises several questions: what specific skills do learners and teachers develop during video conferencing sessions? What is the impact of video conferencing on the teachers' work before and during those sessions? How are those sessions integrated into the ordinary teaching and learning process? How can the cultural dimension of the target language be successfully focused on during those sessions? Such are the questions that are examined in the on-going research on which our presentation will be based.

For the presentation, we will particularly focus on the video conferencing sessions taking place between young French and English learners and present the first results of a comparative study between an ordinary class and a class in which video conferencing is being used. This study relies on a collaborative project in which researchers, teacher-trainers, and French and English teachers are involved. It consists in designing and implementing a teaching unit based on a novel by Roald Dahl, Fantastic Mr Fox (1974) in both the ordinary class and the class using video conferencing, and in comparing the impact of this work on the way students develop social-cultural skills. The aim of this unit is to make the students engage in a joint work on a literary project, to exchange their interpretations of Dahl’s novel during the video conferencing sessions and, in doing so, to build knowledge through a cross-cultural approach.

Another aspect of the presentation will be devoted to the methodological approach and tools used to conduct the research, such as:

- the way the researchers and the teachers work together to build and implement the teaching unit,

- the methods used to collect and process the data,

- and the use of a transcribing software called Transana that is a powerful tool to encode wordings and actions, to build categories and produce graphs so as to put to light the structure of the teaching unit at a meso level.

The theoretical tools we use to conduct our analyses based on precise empirical data are borrowed from three main fields : distance education and, more particularly, research on the effects of video conferencing on the teaching and learning process (Gruson, 2010; Macedo-Rouet, 2009; Moore, 1993), the teaching and learning of foreign languages and cultures (Gruson, 2006; Puren, 2002; Tardieu, 2008) and the joint action theory for didactics (Sensevy, Mercier & Schubauer-Leoni, 2000; Sensevy & Mercier, 2007).

Dahl, R. (1974). Fantastic Mr Fox. London : Penguin Books. Gruson B. (2006). L’enseignement d’une langue étrangère à l’école et au collège : vers une meilleure compréhension des situations didactiques mises en œuvre. PhD Thesis, Rennes 2 University, Rennes. Gruson, B. (2010). Analyse comparative d'une situation de communication orale en classe ordinaire et lors d'une séance en visioconférence, Distances et Savoirs, 3, 8, 395-423. Macedo-Rouet M. (2009). La visioconférence dans l'enseignement. Ses usages et effets sur la distance de transaction, Revue Distances et savoirs, 7, 65-91. Moore, M.G. (1993). Theory of transactional distance. In Keegan, D., Theoretical principles of distance education (pp. 22-38), New York: Routledge. Puren, C. (2002). Perspectives actionnelles et perspectives culturelles en didactique des langues-cultures : vers une perspective co-actionnelle co-culturelle. Langues modernes, 3, 55-71. Sensevy, G., Mercier, A., & Schubauer-Leoni, M-L. (2000). Vers un modèle de l’action didactique du professeur. A propos de la course à 20. Recherches en Didactique des Mathématiques, 20 (3), 263-304. Sensevy, G. et Mercier, A. (2007). Agir ensemble : l’action didactique conjointe. Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Sensevy, G. (in press). Filmer la pratique. Un point de vue de la théorie de l’action conjointe en didactique. In L. Veillard, & A. Tiberghien (Eds.), Instrumentation de la recherche en Education. Le cas du développement d’une base de vidéos de situation d’enseignement et d’apprentissage ViSA. Paris : Presses de la MSH. Tardieu, C. (2008). La didactique des langues en 4 mots-clés. Communication, culture, méthodologie, évaluation. Paris : Ellipses. Tiberghien, A. (2011). Jeux d’échelle dans l’analyse de classes de sciences : usage de Transana dans le traitement des vidéos de classe avec une approche de la classe à différentes échelles. Paper presented at the workshop « Action du professeur - Instrumentation », Rennes, France, January.