This article presents a writing project whose primary goal is the development of linguistic, cross-cultural, and meta-cognitive competencies through the study of a dark episode in French history--the German Occupation. Students create personas who all lived in the same building in 1939 and write their memoirs 60 years later. Following a brief…

One of the major concerns of the foreign language profession today is to find a way to promote better cross-cultural understanding while continuing to develop linguistic skills. This discussion focuses on a series of oral and written tasks based on authentic written texts. (11 references) (VWL)

A cultural awareness technique developed for eighth-grade French students involves having students put together title or section pages in their notebooks on specified topics such as French products, geography, and common symbolism. The pages are later used for class discussion and further study. (MSE)