ABSTRACT
The activity of expert table tennis players during matches under the old scoring system was studied within the French Table Tennis Federation. These studies were conducted from the theoretical framework of the course-of-action (Theureau, 1992) used in ergonomics research. A course of action is a chain of elementary units of meaning (EUMs) or activity units that are meaningful for the actor. When actors are asked to describe their activity, they spontaneously break down the continuous stream of actions into discrete units that are meaningful to them. These discrete units may be physical actions, communicative exchanges, interpretations, or feelings: they constitute the EUMs of the course of action. The course of action reflects the temporal organization of the activity and is analysed in relation to situational variables. This methodology relies on videotaped recordings collected in real situations, and then self-confrontation interviews in which the actors viewing the videotapes are urged to recall and explain what they were experiencing at the time (von Cranach and Harré, 1982). This methodological framework provides a means for describing and finely analyzing a person’s activity in accordance with its temporal dynamics, and for grasping the meaning each actor gives to his/her own activity. The results of our previous studies showed that the players’ actions were organized to form sequences dividing each match into phases of exploration and execution (Sève, 2000; Sève et al., 2003). Matches began with an inquiry period during which the players looked for strokes that impinged upon the opponent’s play. Regardless of the outcome of the inquiry phase, however, it had to come to an end when the players felt they could no longer afford to sacrifice points for fear of losing the match. The activity of table tennis players during a match could not be reduced to the mere performance of skills acquired during practice and the application of predefined plans: it included exploration, learning, and disguise. During games, players constructed and validated new knowledge about the current interactive situation by testing hypotheses, which were necessarily limited in number due to the risk of losing points and the game (Sève et al., 2002).
