Presents a proposal to bring literature into the basic program of instruction and make it a meaningful component of the learning process. A model lesson describes how literary texts can be perceived and studied as performances of a language. (CB)

This article stresses the idea that teaching communicative competence and the ability to deal with a variety of language situations should be the goal of foreign language teaching, with grammar instruction in a secondary position. Teaching by means of "dialogues with options" is discussed and sample dialogues for Italian instruction are given.…