From the development perspective, teaching-learning situations imply an interplay of the actors’ verbal actions, each of which are directed to the actions of the others as to the object of knowledge. From this perspective, disequilibrium and co-regulation are fundamental, as well as the emergence of the new knowledge. The objective of this work is to explore the concept of communicative action (Habermas) in order to describe the cognitive disequilibrium and co-regulation in a teaching-learning situation. Aiming to characterize each verbal action according to Habermas, a teacher-student dialogue was analyzed. Then, each communicative action was related to its consequence to the interaction, in disequilibrium or co-regulation terms. This analysis allowed to describe the dynamics of the communicative actions. These actions, through successive disequilibrium and co-regulations, gave the conditions for restructuring the actors’ semantic field as well as for the emergence of new knowledge about the object.
Communicative action; disequilibration; co-regulation; teacher-student interaction