This French composition course features a creative approach to process writing. Learners, in groups of two or three, select a genre, a mini-novel, skits or epistolary novel, and construct a story with embedded grammatical, rhetorical, and stylistic constraints. User-friendly instructive tools intended to stimulate creativity and facilitate language accuracy are readily available on the instructor's website. There, learners have access to a panoply of descriptive and narrative excerpts featuring various genres, moods, and registers. They also find pedagogically relevant reference works such as lexical and semantic webs, dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammatical descriptions, and literary, historical and Francophone civilization links. This carefully orchestrated course is a natural environment for 'scaffolding' and 'noticing' the gap between the language they experience from the various sources of input and their own output. It also aims at targeting 'avoidance' and 'overuse' strategies that often immobilize learners' language development and creativity.



Text: Grammaire progressive du français, niveau intermédiaire de Grégoire et Thiévenaz chez CLE INTERNATIONAL (2003; ISBN 978-2090338485)