Many First Nations people in Canada struggle in the acquisition of the skills associated with western literacy, that is, with the skills necessary to communicate through reading, writing, and numeracy in either English or French. Rooted in the history of colonial education, this problem continues to have a negative impact on the lives of…

Motivating students towards language learning includes embedding meaningful themes, communicative tasks, and authentic assessments. When voice and choice are held as essential qualities of the task, students invest in the resources to make meaning and express their own thoughts, thus moving us away from traditional assessments that emphasize…

In this article, four second language writing specialists address the following significant questions related to foreign language (FL) writing instruction: (1) How is FL writing different from English as a second language writing? (2) How does the sociolin-guistic role of a given FL influence how writing is employed in the overall curriculum for…

This paper presents an e-collaboration project involving real-time videoconferencing exchanges between students from the University of Westminster and the Université Catholique de Lille. Students drew on diverse resources, including written quantitative data and first-hand qualitative data in French/English to complete weekly tasks. Follow-up work…

A text-editing approach to composition in the foreign language classroom is set forth. In a 15-week composition course meeting three times each week, students prepare a weekly composition that they will revise after an in-class text-editing session involving several student papers. The third day is devoted to grammar work. Criteria for evaluating…

Describes the way one teacher used Raymond Queneau's "Exercices de style" in a college-level French composition course. The students prepared 15 to 20 assignments, which focused on grammar and syntax, logical development of ideas, changes in perspective, shifts in mood or tonality, and experiments with different literary genres. (SED)

A description of a course in French composition at the University of Essex, which is based on "Exercices de style, " by R. Queneau. The course consists of writing variations of a single model story or paragraph. Six variations are presented and discussed to clarify the method. (AMH)

The process of learning to write, particularly in a foreign language, is long and complex. There is a truth in the saying that the best method of learning to write is to read, and especially, to write. (Author)

Student teachers at Paris' Alliance Francaise, inspired by three photographs, wrote their own short stories as a writing project. The project was divided into three meetings for the purpose of developing rhythm for writing and providing guidance for the student regarding the form of his or her work. Two of the completed stories are appended. (MSE)

Discusses the use of student journals in a second-semester university French class. Students write informally in their journals about topics that are of personal interest to them. The instructor then writes comments about the topic and also corrects the vocabulary, grammar, and idiomatic errors of each journal entry. (SED)

This article presents a writing portfolio project whose primary goal is to integrate the development of proficiency skills, content knowledge, and grammatical competence through literary study. Excerpts from Queneau's (1947) "Exercices de style," which tells the same story 99 times, serve as the basis for this portfolio project: These excerpts are…

This collection of student essays provides illustrations of the criteria used to grade the composition portion of the sixth-grade achievement test used in Alberta (Canada). An introductory section describes the procedures for selecting the essays used, establishing scoring norms, and scoring the tests, and offers general comments on the writing…

Describes an on-going computer-mediated communication (CMC) cross-cultural project between French and American university students. Explores the possibilities and limits of CMC, using the research of Paul Ricaeur and Claire Kramsch, who provide a practical and theoretical framework in which to analyze student-authored writing. (Author/VWL)

An experimental literary contest in Germany has been highly successful in instructing and encouraging students of French as a second language to write their own short stories. Teachers begin with a key phrase and use it to generate ideas for later small-group and paired writing and interactive comprehension exercises. (MSE)

Presents some points of divergence between current English and French rhetorical theory. Documents a few standard forms of composition in French that are not found in the English. Assesses pedagogies typical of the French tradition and concludes that the theory and pedagogy of the two languages are quite disparate. (AEW)