Second language learning is a humanistic undertaking. It involves human beings in all the ways that characterize human interactions. The ultimate worth of second-language methodologies and approaches is to be found in how well learners are able to extend their classroom experience to discourse outside the instructional framework (1987:15).

Scenario Title: Try Saying It with Flowers
Role A: (male or female) You run a flower shop. You have fresh roses but your other flowers are not fresh (they are wilted). If you don't sell them soon. you will have to destroy them or throw them away. As a result, you will lose money. Try to sell the old flowers to the next customer.
Role B: (male) You have just met a young German woman. She has invited you to dinner. You have been told that you should bring flowers to your hostess. Roses are especially fitting in these situations. Prepare yourself to purchase some flowers in the flower shop.

Neither the method of achieving the task nor the strategy to be employed is dictated to the groups of students preparing to play the roles. Learners are given, or encouraged to assume, complete freedom in choosing their strategies and conversational roles. They may interpret a role as they wish, so long as it remains consistent with information discovered from the other group. Because of this openness, the scenario role elicits the kind of L2 performance that requires mediation and in this way seeks to foster language acquisition.
 
Scenarios are executed in three phases in the classroom: the rehearsal, the performance, and the debriefing. In the rehearsal phase, the members of each group discuss their role among themselves and decide on strategies by which their goal can be achieved. One student from each group is chosen to 'play' the role during the next phase, the performance. During the performance, the group representatives may have recourse to their groups by requesting a time out. At this point. strategies may have to be reconsidered, adopted or abandoned, depending on new information that has been discovered during the interaction of the roles. Finally, the solutions are discussed during the debriefing phase that follows the performance. Alternate strategies, culture-specific customs and attitudes. accomplishment of goals and language use are all possible topics for discussion during debriefing. Various matters of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation are also taken up, as appropriate.
 
As conceived by Di Pietro, the scenario is not used to display competence, but to require students to engage in L2 discourse. The target language is used to achieve universal human goals. Additionally, students benefit from their involvement in a group activity that develops individual competence.

2. Procedure

Our goal in this study was to apply the basic principles of SI to a written task, retaining the properties of group work, inventive outcome, and hidden agenda. This activity was initially undertaken as an exercise on the culture-specific schema of letter writing. The letters students were asked to write were seen as a natural outgrowth of SI's goal of developing individual competence, whether that competence is in the oral or written mode. One of the striking characteristics of SI is its goal to allow students to rely on other than grammatical competence in the foreign language. We wanted to stimulate our students to do less grammatical monitoring, and engage in more realistic communication in a written activity.
 
We proceeded to conduct two experiments. The first, in French, served as a sort of pilot study, and the second, improved in several aspects, was conducted in Spanish. The format we decided to use was to have the students from one class write letters to students in another class.

2.1. French

Two French classes at the University of Delaware participated in the pilot study. The first assignment asked students to write letters in French introducing themselves to a pen-pal in another class. After the instructors had read the letters and given the students credit for having completed the assignment, they were distributed randomly to the other class. Students in the second class were then required to answer their pen-pal letters, again receiving homework credit. Several students continued writing to each other, or met each other, after the fulfillment of the class requirements.
 
While this activity was worthwhile in that students had the opportunity to write in French and interact with each other, the interaction was between individuals, and not groups, thus restricting the opportunity the students might have for collective learning (see Donato 1988 for a difference between 'collective' and 'collaborative' learning). Also, the interaction was not necessarily strategic. The students were not obligated to access social or cultural strategic competencies in order to complete the assignment.
 
In reviewing our French pilot activity, we found that we had met the criteria of the SI in some ways, but not in others. By modifying our scenario activity we could more fully incorporate the ideas of SI.
 
Because there were fewer students in one of the French classes. Several of those in the larger class responded to a single letters a team effort. This prompted us to rethink the activity in terms of group or team writing and therefore, group interaction. We also needed to introduce a hidden agenda or problem in order for the students to interact strategically in hopes that they would therefore create a better product. Finally, because of the enormous student interest in the activity, we felt that we should continue the correspondence over a more extended period of time.

2.1 Spanish

Two second year Spanish classes participated in the second version of our procedure. As a homework assignment, all of the students, in both classes were told to write a personal ad. The next day in class students were divided into pairs and told to rewrite and combine the ads they had written for homework into one reworked ad. The revised ads from each class were then numbered to preserve the anonymity of the authors and typed up in newsletter form with some editing by the instructor. Copies of the appropriate newsletter were given to all members of the reciprocating class.
 
A new homework assignment was made to write a letter in response to any personal ad in the newsletter, requesting advice about some sort of personal problem. The students were free to chose which ad they wished to answer, and to choose the nature of their 'problem.' The result was that some of the ad writers--remember that the ads were written in pairs--received many letters, and some, few or none. Generally, this variation was due to the subject and creativity apparent in the ad.

The letters were submitted to the instructor, who read them and gave students credit for completion of the assignment. The letters were then put in envelopes, and delivered to the writers in the other class. It was necessary for the instructors to keep a record of the students involved in writing each ad, and which letter each student wrote, because many of the students wrote anonymously or used an alias.
 
The original groups which had written the ads, having received an assortment of letters. responded to any of these they wished, and distributed letters they chose not to answer to groups that did not receive any letters. These responses were again read by the instructors, placed in envelopes, and delivered to the individual authors in the corresponding class. The process was repeated once more for those students or groups of students who wanted to participate. Several students continued the correspondence even further.
 
Figure 1 shows schematically the alternation in interaction between individuals and groups. As can be seen, although all of the interaction is writte,. in keeping with the purpose or our activity, half of the writing is done by individual students as homework, and the other half is done by groups of students in the classroom. This affords the student the opportunity to write alone, the usual situation when writing, and allows her to interact in two ways. First she writes with one or more partners, providing the environment for interactive learning, and second, as in the previously described French activity, she interacts by responding to ads and letters from other students.

3. Interpretation
 
One advantage of this writing activity over more traditional writing assignments, is that it encourages the students lo concentrate on the intended message in their writing, rather than on its grammatical form alone. In this way the task more closely resembles most of the writing activities people engage in on a daily basis. A second advantage is that unlike the usual oral application of SI, the students produce a protocol, or written record of the interaction which can be used in debriefing. It is from these protocols that the instructor can demonstrate grammatical and cultural conventions. Unlike oral scenarios, the students and teacher work with the artifact of the interaction itself, and not simply with their recollection of the interaction.
 
We found that an effective method of conducting the debriefing was to prepare overhead transparencies from actual student work. This was non-threatening to the students because either the letters were anonymous or written by students from another class. Students were never made to feel embarrassed by seeing their name associated with errors in front of the class. The teacher can take full advantage of good examples from student work as well as comment on errors. The letters thus served as a springboard to grammar lessons, culture capsules, and further interactive activities.
 
One item discussed during the debriefing of our activity was that, although we had reviewed the discourse structure of personal letters in Romance cultures, and despite a brief outline of these letter-writing conventions in the textbook, very few of the students accessed these structures. Rather, they relied on their discourse convention for English letter-writing. We feel the students did this because their focus during the interaction was on complying with the hidden agenda. namely to communicate a problem, or respond to the problem in the letter they received, and not on complying with the grammatical agenda of following proper discourse structure in the foreign language. Most of the students, therefore, wrote creative and interesting letters in the presentation of their problems, while the format of their letters followed English letter-writing etiquette. Had the assignment been to write a proper target-language letter with emphasis on form rather than on content, we are confident that the letters would have been superior grammatically, but much less creative and spontaneous.
 
In (1) and (2) are examples of personal ads. The protocols marked (a) were produced by student dyads in class; those marked (b) are the instructor's corrected version as printed in the newsletter.
 

(1)	(a)	Me llamo Juanita Margarita Conchita Guererra y estoy buscando por hombre simpatico, guapo, intelligente, y quien esta buscando por una amistad. Puedes encontrarme en el teléfono 783-8462
	(b)	Me llamo Juanita Margarita Conchita Guerrera y busco un hombre simpático, guapo e inteligente, que busque una amistad. Puedes encontrarme en el teléfono 783-8462.
(2)	(a)	Nos llamos Sandy y Jeff y son esposas.Estamos muy viejo. Querremos un otro matrimonio para actividades en la fin de las semanas. Llamanos a telefono 731-5467.
	(b)	Nos llamamos Sandy y Jeff y somos esposos. Somos muy viejos. Queremos a otro matrimonio para actividades los fines de semana. Llámennos por teléfono: 731-5467.

 
Showing the corrected form to the students by means of the newsletter, the teacher is able to provide indirect, yet specific feedback in a non-threatening manner. We did not wish to alter the basic tenor of the notices, but merely to polish the grammar. The corrections made in (2) are listed in (3). They were limited to such things as supplying proper verb conjugations, rectifying agreement, or providing orthographic markings. Some of the ads, and the letters as we have already mentioned, were not stylistically appropriate to Hispanic culture. These corrections also could have been made, but may have appeared to alter drastically some of the students' writing.
 

(3) ERROR	CORRECTION	TEACHER SUPPLIED:
llamos  son  esposas  estamos  viejo    querremos    un    ø   en la fin de las semanas    llamanos    a	llamamos somos esposos somos viejos queremos ø a los fines de semana llámennos por	proper verb form verb agreement gender agreement verb choice number agreement present not future deletion personal 'a' idiomatic usage accent mark; plural verb form proper word

  
In response lo the personal ads remember that individuals wrote letters. One such letter, lo María from Rafael, is shown in (4). There were no actual students named María nor Rafael in either Spanish class. This use of an alias allowed the student pretending to be Rafael lo be more candid and creative in his writing and to put things on paper that he might have been too intimidated to write otherwise.
 

(4)     María.
       Leí su clasificado en el periódico ayer. Es muy posible que seas la chica para mi. Me llamo Rafael y tengo 22 años también. Me gustan los deportes de baloncesto, tenis, y fútbol americano. También me gusta música y toque la guitarra. Durante los veranos, voy a la plava. Me divierto la playa con el sol y el aire libre. María, soy alto: 191 cm. También, soy intelligente y mi situacción financiera es buena. Perro, María, tengo un problema. Esparo que no pense que soy malo a cause de este problema. Me gusta tocar la guitarra mucha. Muchas veces toque y escribo la música en el medio de la noche. Necesito tocar cuando las ideas están abundante. Muchas veces no estoy contento porque mi música no es completa y tocará para muchas horas. Es posible que esta situación perturbete. Sin embargo, quiero encontrarte. Te llamara mañana a las ocho de la noche. Hasta luego.            Rafael

The letter in (5) is the response to Rafael. This letter was written in class by a group.

(5)     Rafael.
        Era muy aleigre recibir su carta. Parece que es una persona interesante y divertimiena. Soy muy alegre que nos gustan las cosas mismas. Me gusta a la piaya mucho, especialidad en la noche. Me gusta la guitarra y gustaría escuchar toca. No puedo esperar ir a la playa y jugar al tenis con tú. No me molesta que toca la guitarra tan mucha. Creo que es bueno que está tan dedicado. No puedo esperar para su llama telefono. ¡Hasta luego!        María

4. Description of further research
 
The writing assignments suggested by this activity parallel real life writing situations and are therefore natural in their purpose and intended audience. They exemplify Di Pietro's belief that languages are best learned as tools. Because people engage in such writing tasks in their daily lives, this natural quality coupled with the strategic need to resolve a problem in writing make this activity a significant advancement in the scope of SI methodology while maintaining the method's basic theoretical foundation and goals.
 
We feel, due to the rather complicated nature of compiling and copying personal ads, and collecting and distributing, both group-written and individually-written letters, that using computer technology in this activity would simplify and improve the process. Work in the field of computer assisted instruction (CAI), specifically as it relates to L2 instruction, can serve as another parallel to real life writing situations. Students can work in groups in many applications of CAI, thus benefiting from the collaboration in real life interaction with the computer, the instructor or other students. Such computer group work was begun at the University of Turin, Italy (Borello 1990). There, the computer is used in several ways, including group work and text comprehension. and Borello reports that "students enjoy working together, [and] as many as three students can be put in front of the computer.  Slight frustration results at not being able to do the typing, but discussions and suggestions among the students are always positive" (1990: 490).
 
Quinn (1990) emphasizes the advantages of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) offers to students and teachers.  While he points out that the widespread use of computers has been hindered by a lack of high-quality software, and that this lack of software "is still keenly felt," our letter writing activity could be easily carried out on computers using existing and readily available software programs, i.e., word processors and an electronic bulletin board.
 
Happily, the goals of SI are achievable with the technology of the microcomputer, i.e., enabling students to comprehend and converse, not only by means of forms, but also by combining those forms and grammatical units into culture specific sentences and discourse.  The focus of the computer can easily be communication among individuals and among groups of students.  Lessons presented via computer software can be made communicative and thus increase motivation and interaction.  Quinn (1990) observes that if students actually must use L2 to solve problems, learners are more engaged and can personally relate to materials that are amusing or emotionally stimulating.
 
In research undertaken at the University of Arizona,  L2 students tended to become involved in computerized activities, regardless of the programs and activities available on the computer (Smith 1990).  Further, those students given computer time for L2 writing devoted more time to learning activities than did students without such benefits.  Smith studied students over the course of a semester and discovered that "computer users improved significantly in their ability to read and express oral and written ideas" (1990: 80-81).  Computer-literate language instructors today have in their bags of tricks electronic bulletin boards, writing packages like Word Perfect. and computer conferencing,, that help generate interactive and collaborative tasks.  While it is not yet clear what benefits accrue from collaborative writing efforts on line, it has been demonstrated that computers encourage students to be more creative and to write more than students with no access to computers.
 
This technology will not only simplify the complications of distributing letters, but will also encourage group work and simplify and make grading less obtrusive.  Because much of the activity can be done during lab periods, computer work need not impinge on valuable classroom time when interaction with the teacher may be more profitable.
 
Future research should be directed to study the benefits of the computer as a technique with theoretically based methodologies, such as SI.  Discovering techniques and methods that engage students in the L2 at the same time as they help develop strategic competence is a first step in helping our students become true language learners.

NOTE

We wish to thank Professor Di Pietro for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper.  Thanks also to Diana Diehl and Lynn Palermo for their assistance with the project.

WORKS CITED

Borello, Enrico. 1990.  "Teaching languages on the computer at the University of Turin: CAI and interactive videodisc." Computers and the Humanities 24:489-93. 
 
Brooks, Nelson. 1960. Language and Language Learning: Theory and Practice.  New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
 
Canale, Michael, and Merrill Swain. 1980.  "Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language Teaching and Testing." Applied Linguistics l: 1-47.
 
Christie,  Katrien, and Roberta Church Jacquet.  "Partnerships and Collectives: Evidence for Methodology." In preparation.
 
Di Pietro,  Robert J. 1987.  Strategic Interaction: Learning Languages through Scenarios.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 
__________. 1988.  "Scenario Writing: A Means to Promote Interactive Discourse." Delaware Papers in Linguistics.  Ed.  James P. Lantolf.  University of Delaware: Department of Linguistics, 1-10.
 
__________. 1989 (revised).  "Writing as a Social Activity in the ISL Classroom." Presented at the international conference on Current issues in L2 Learning & Teaching: Applications to ISL.  Toronto.  Oct. 11 - 14. 1988. 
 
Donato,  Richard. 1988.  "Beyond Group: a Psycholinguistic Rationale for Collective Activity in Second Language Learning." Diss.  University of Delaware.
 
Long, Michael H. 1985.  "Input and Second Language Acquisition Theory." Input in Second Language Acquisition.  Ed.  Susan NI.  Gass & Carolyn G. Madden. Rowley, Massachusetts: Newbury House, 371-93. 
 
Oller, John W., Jr. 1979.  Language Tests at School: A Pragmatic Approach.  Essex: Longman.
 
Quinn,  Robert A. 1990.  "Our progress in integrating modern methods and computer-controlled learning for successful language study.  Hispania 73: 297-31 l.
 
Savignon,  Sandra J. 1983.  Communicative Competence: Theory and Classroom Practice.  Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley.
 
Smith.  Karen L. 1990.  "Collaborative and Interactive Writing for Increasing Communication Skills." Hispania 73: 77-87.