Journey in Writing

This French composition course features a creative approach to process writing. Students, individually or in small groups, select from descriptive documents to construct paragraphs leading to 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, where students 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, literary, historical and Francophone civilizations 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.