The examination for the C.A.P.E.S. (Certificat d'Aptitude Professionnelle a l'Enseignement Secondaire) includes a ten-minute "precise and concise" oral talk on a short story. The presentation is to be prepared in a short time and delivered in a polished manner. Because of the high failure rate, an experimental course is being designed at the University of Nancy II to enable candidates to meet the desired objectives. The work completed so far is discussed in this paper, namely: (1) the pedagogical approach based on recent work in discourse analysis and communicative competence; (2) the discourse model used, including the textual, communicative and discursive levels of linguistic organization; (3) the corpus of video recordings of simulated examination situations; and (4) the process for analysis of the simulations in three stages corresponding to the three levels in the theoretical model. One insight of general interest is that as one goes from discourse that contains a high degree of interaction to that which does not, the organizational effect of the propositional content is found to increase. Therefore, it is noted that, in this particular case, the most important single factor in the discourse analysis is the ordering of the propositional content. A plan of the course, according to weeks and topics, and five appendices that provide samples of the working documents complete the paper. (AMH)