Group items tagged

When I first used Queneau's Exercices for teaching, I would hand out photocopied passages from nineteenth- or twentieth-century French authors, and students would work on these texts, changing the tense, point of view, sequence of events, and so on, as needed. More recently, I have used practice texts from a single work, Albert Camus's novel L'étranger , whose stylistic simplicity lends itself admirably to the purposes of the course. The students are given a two-paragraph excerpt from the novel for written assignments and a different passage for in-class practice. The advantage of having a single text is that in a short time the student has committed that text to memory, knows it in minute detail. The vocabulary and syntax are not an ever-renewed obstacle, and the student can proceed directly to stylistic modification of the text.