It is communally assumed that the same contents are not taught and learned in the same manner in different level of school. A literary text for instance is looked at mainly for immediate comprehension in primary school, for a primary interpretative approach based on comprehension in lower secondary school and for more complex interpretation in an intertextual perspective on the higher secondary school. Does this classical view really represent real classroom practice? We will present some data that challenge this view and show that the ways of teaching are rearranged following patterns that question the idea of linear progression in teaching complex contents. School practices, here looked at through the teaching of literature, appear as a complex sedimentation of the classical approach and ways of teaching literary text that mix, on every school level, parts of the ways of others.

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