This article concerns the teaching reading method in Cours Préparatoire. The author relates to the most recent results in research on learning to read, particularly those from cognitive psychology, and refers to the paradigm of interactive and contextualized processes. The empirical work is an analysis of teacher’s action and children’s activities during a lesson on discovering a text. It leads to an explicit formalization of the processes which the students use in order to identify words in an extract of a text. This research offers access to the understanding of similar works which have the same goals, namely the observation, analysis and understanding of the main activities which constitute the practices of teaching reading.