The Pupil's Discourse and Action Projects: The Case of Third Year High School Pupils in Tunisia

The purpose of this paper is to describe the language interaction of pupils in a football game situation and to show how the action plans are implemented. We have opted for a descriptive/exploratory methodology that seeks to convey the pupil’s language typologies: 8 sessions lasting one hour each with 14 boys aged 18 years and T = 8 hours of actual practice. The goal is to help pupils to understand what happens during the play situation in order to co-construct and implement a project of collective action. The study includes: 1)a qualitative analysis (Roulet, 1987) of Team“A”which aims to identify action projects developed by the boys, 2)a quantitative analysis of the same team (Grehaigne, Billiards,& Laroche, 1999) seeking to check the implementation of these projects. The quantitative study showed that pupils were able to validate their action plans during the eight sessions. These results should be linked to the notion of“communication contract.”Indeed, in every act of communication, partners understand and interact with each other by validating what makes sense to them, namely:“the collective intentions”(Searle, 1991),“joint intentionality”(Sensevy, 2008) and“negotiation”(Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1984).