For most pupils from the French speaking part of Belgium, the learning of a foreign language begins at grade 5. At this school level, the purpose of the course is communication; this one is centered on the four major competences: listening, speaking, reading and writing and the teaching must be focused on oral dimension.

Observations in language classes (Blondin, Straeten, 2002) confirmed the existence of many activities based on oral dimension, but these observations showed as well that the communication objective is not achieved. The number of the teachers utterances is much higher than the one of the pupils all together. This statement is almost generalized in the specialized literature. Chaudron (1988) revealed that the teacher speech represents 65% to 75% of the total amount of the utterances. So, it seems essential to organize the class in order to allow pupils’ interactions at school.

Work in subgroups seems to be able to contribute to this learning, but the resort to working groups in language courses remains very limited. Besides, it is not sufficient to gather pupils in groups and ask them to work together to have them collaborate and succeed. So, one of the objectives of the research was to identify conditions promoting cooperation as well as an efficient subgroups working process with young pupils starting a foreign language learning.

Cooperative learning characteristics (mainly the positive interdependence and individual accountability) notably described by Abrami et al (1996) have been taken into account in our approach and twenty-three cooperative learning activities in the language field have been designed in a close collaboration with language teachers. Implementations in classes have allowed to elaborate methodological indications and to describe conditions for an efficient cooperation more precisely.

In this research context, it was of course planned to measure the effects of the suggested tool in terms of fair speech distribution and of target language proportion. Quantitative information has been collected to answer to the following questions:

-          Does the suggested tool really offer the pupils more opportunities to speak?

-          To what extent are these utterances shared with equity among groups’ members?

-          What is the ratio of the utterances and words in target language and in mother tongue?

-          What are the respective proportions of the utterances concerning the task and out of subject?

The paper will present the main characteristics of the designed tool in the research framework and will explain the results of the various measures.

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