Raluca Nicolae

The Experience of Writing a Co-Narrative: Story-Building in Japanese Language Teaching

The current chapter is the output of an interactive workshop on story-building in Japanese language, called Monogatari o tsukurō (Let’s make up a story). The main purpose of the workshop was to produce a co-narrative revolving around a set of symbolic words by correctly translating from the source language (Romanian) into the target language (Japanese) in an exciting and interactive manner. Instead of focusing on competition, this classroom activity emphasized participation and engagement through games and story-building. From this respect, the chapter explores issues related to the design of a collective narrative game and it investigates new modes of co-narrating the story by combining key elements such as creativity, curiosity, and engagement as parts of the language learning process in general, and of acquiring writing skills, in particular. Moreover, the chapter tries to draw a line between sakubun (composition) and co-narrative, a story which is or, at least, tends to be the result of the participational efforts of all the students in the classroom as collaborative writing solicits immediate feedback from the peers.