Essential Rules of Improve
There are a host of improve games and forms that are practiced throughout the world (Kozlowski, 2002; Libera, 2004; Napier, 2004; Sawyer, 2003a). Despite this variety, there is a set of rules that all improvisers agree on in order to yield more effective improvisational performances. This set of rules is a grassroots theory known as an ethnotheory. According to Lutz (1987, pp. 291–292), an ethnotheory is an explicit and abstract body of knowledge, as well as a set of everyday practices. In this section, I focus on a subset of these rules that I consider relevant to the inclusion of improve activities within formal language learning environments.