Synopsis

“Mindful of the fact that one of the most important ingredients in learning to write in a foreign language is motivation, the authors have experimented in their classes with a wide range of exercises from a very useful source: Gianni Rodari's "Grammatico della Fantasia: lntroduzione all'arte di inventare storie" (Torino: Piccola Biblioteca Einandi, 1973). Rodari provides a list of recipes and concoctions for developing writing practice. Some of his ideas have already been tested, but the authors have tried to test all of his ideas, and can say that these experiments with intermediate students have been successful. They believe the reasons for their success are these: (1) The exercises have been devised to motivate the students to use and improve their writing skills; (2) Most of them are done as pair work or group work, which facilitates communication between the students; (3) The exercises usually consist of two or three parts, so that they are not too long and boring. The students must do the first part well in order to accomplish the second; (4) Most important of all, they require the students to exercise imagination; and (5) The exercises require the students to establish relationships between concepts, ideas, and words outside of normal use, which forces them to review their primary use. This is a further semantic step. All these reasons can be summed up in one: the exercises are an "imaginative approach" to teaching varieties of writing. To show what these exercises are like, the authors describe some of them, adding illustrative examples where necessary.”