Writing History in the Voice of an Other: Debyser's Immeuble at the Advanced Level

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 description of global simulation, I present an outline of the project and student commentaries to provide empirical evidence of the value of narratives in foreign language learning to create a collaborative community of active learners.