Saisir le niveau méso-interactionnel dans l'interaction didactique: autour des notions de saturation et de mésoalternance

While instructional interaction is shaped by situated and dynamic conversational mechanisms, it also realises institutional "projects" designed beforehand (i.e. in the curriculum). In order to interpret participants' orientation towards these projects, as it is displayed in interaction, drawing on a meso-interactional level is often needed. We analyse two phenomena relating to this level in early immersion classroom interaction: saturation, an interactive process aiming at the co-construction of the necessary information at a given point in interaction, in relation to a given activity, and meso-alternation, performing language alternation at certain points of transition between activities addressing both didactic strategies and institutional organisation. The identification of this meso-interactional level lies on theoretical, methodological and epistemological issues. In between approaches that are deeply rooted in the micro level and do not find it useful to oppose it to a macro level and those that provide a top-down perspective on the micro-level, our approach offers a bottom-up perspective (micro to macro). This results in applying a new lense on analytical units of/in interaction and an integrated or continuous treatment of different types of data.