4 The Conquest of Vocabulary
Has the experience of reading this text done something to you? What? Should this text be more widely read? Why? 3 The third use is much more elaborate and creative, and could serve in literature to give more advanced learners experience of styles, just as musicians can compose à la manière de Ravel, Dubussy, or Mozart and still have their own style. To practice such “games,” one can use a number of periods in which people listen, with their eyes shut, to a good reader reading a passage of any one of the texts, and have to guess who has written it. If this exercise is correctly carried out, it tells us that the listeners now have an ear for styles. It is possible that some of the students may guess almost at the first sentence, if the author’s style is so characteristic, or if they have really developed such sensitivity to style, or else if their memory is such that they know who wrote which extract in that book, in which case another anthology should, of course, be used. After a successful trial of this kind, themes could be proposed for attempts to write à la manière de x, y or z. If these exercises are also successful, each learner will have at his disposal an arsenal of styles in contrast to or according to which he may form his own. Naturally, much of what has been said about the third anthology and its uses can be done more easily with the mother tongue, 103