The study of the role of language activity in higher education in France has been evolving, in the past few years, out of the larger field of ‘la didactique du français,’ the field of L1 teaching and theory across all grade levels. This larger frame has provided several themes that are now being explored in higher education writing: language activity as a mode of co-construction of knowledge in school settings rather than a transparent medium, writing, reading and speaking as intimately disciplinary activities, writing as a recursive process, speaking and writing as complementary, and the reconfiguration of the discipline of L1 French as a result of these explorations.