The major changes occurring in the world at economical, political, communicational & environmental levels require thinking again teaching and learning in relation to the collectively built mass of knowledge. In this perspective, the students must be able to develop citizen skills in several spheres of the human activity, as communicational skills which must be developed in various and contextualized situations. The educational systems in general and in Switzerland particularly try to reach this expectation in the curriculum by studying among others various types of speech (adventure stories, fairy tales, letter, ...) in French classroom. But types of speech may also be encountered as tools for communicating in other subject matters. This proposal focuses on the writing of historical narratives as a content included in the two subject matters (French language and History classroom) at grade 5 of the Geneva primary school (Department of public instruction in Geneva, 2007; CIIP, 2010).

In the French-speaking tradition of schooling in Switzerland, knowledge is framed in the subject matters with the aim to engage the students in some specific ways of thinking which are more or less tied to the functioning of academic disciplines or social activities. However the disciplines and all of topics are taught to the same class by generalist teachers whose professional identity does not depend directly on a discipline (Schneuwly, 2011). In this case, the transitions from one discipline to another or from one content to another are an important question for the teacher who teaches in the primary school. The content of knowledge at the crossroad of two disciplines raises the questions of the disciplinary boundaries and the similarities/differences among of the teaching and learning practices and their purposes. What is different or similar in the teaching and learning of the writing historical narratives in French language and in History classroom ? Where are the limits of disciplinary boundaries pushed?

Considering the theoretical framework of comparative didactics (Mercier, Schubauer-Leoni & Sensevy, 2002; Ligozat, 2010, 2011a), we focus on generic and specific dimensions of the relationship between the teacher and the students in the process of teaching/learning about these objects. This approach allows us to examine the "disciplinary boundaries" of a similar content and to study the logic of the transitions from one discipline to another one in the teaching practices (Stevens, Wineburg, Herrenkohl & Bell, 2005). We consider that the content learnt is co-constructed in the joint action of the teacher and the students, within the triadic system [teacher, student, content] (Sensevy & Mercier (Eds), 2007). However, classroom practices are also partly determined by the curriculum and more particularly, the teaching resources according to the didactic transposition (Chevallard, 1985/91; 2007). The resources produce the didactic actions according to the way the text is invested by the teacher; the purposes that the teacher recognizes in the text (Sosniak & Stodolsky, 1993; Ligozat, 2011b). In order to observe the possible moves of the disciplinary boundaries and the relationships to the objects that are taught in the classroom, the first step of the study is to compare the type of tasks embedded in the teaching materials upon which the teaching practice develops.

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