This article summarizes the principal challenges that learners of French encounter when composing written narratives, and describes the various verbal and written strategies of intervention that teachers of French adopt in order to assist their students to master the art of short fiction. The support that the teachers bring to their students is characterized by a line of questioning designed to encourage creativity or to detect errors, by a rubric of criteria, or by advice in the form of suggestions or directives. Depending on the frequency of their usage, these teaching style, which we call "piloting" (pedagogic remarks), "guidance" (general comments on student errors), "guidage" (more targeted comments), weaving (explanations with intertextual references) or "corrections" (detailed comments accompanied by proposed corrections), determine the degree of influence that the teacher exerts on the final product.
