Cyberliterature, microstories and their exploitation
XAVIER FRÍAS CONDE, UNED (SPAIN)
ALFONSO LÓPEZ, CES DON BOSCO (SPAIN)
Abstract
This paper argues that micro literature, in its different versions, can be very fertile ground for
teaching both literature and language. As very short literature, micro pieces allow for very
versatile teaching, ranging from intensive reading and writing during class-time to blended
learning supported by web applications, especially weblogs and social networks. In what
follows, will we will first look at different forms of micro literature, as well as the concept of
cyber literature. We will then give suggestions of how (cyber) micro literature can be
exploited in class, and report a real classroom experience with Spanish teacher training
students.
1. The concepts of microliterature, cyberliterature and others
1.1. The vehicle: the internet
In order to discuss contemporary literature, it is necessary to establish the different ways
in which literature can be delivered to readers; indeed, it is necessary to refer to the different
supports it can take nowadays, since paper books are not the sole vehicle for literature,
especially since the quick widespread of the internet era.
It is then necessary to make a clear difference between three very important concepts:
1. Conventional Literature is traditional literature whose vehicle is paper.
2. Digital Literature doesn’t have paper as its vehicle, but electronic devices,
such as e-readers, tablets, notebooks, etc.
3. Cyberliterature, published just on the net, so that texts are to be find just
online, where its main -but not only- vehicle is blogs.
All these formats can be exchangeable. That means that a literary text created under
one of them can be exported to another one, but not in a proportional, balanced way in both
directions, since trends and fluency are different, such as it is represented in the following
graphic, which shows the different relationships between the three literary supports:
The graphic reflects then the larger or shorter possibilities of format exchange, as well
as the costs, the diffusion and some other items.
1.2. Cyberliterature
Let's then concentrate on cyberliterature, given that all the experiences we are going to
refer to have the internet as their main support, though not the only one. Since it is quite a
modern phenomenon, it will require some explanations about its main features and typology,
even if we will only discuss its shortest forms.
The vast majority of cyberliterature texts are short, yet it is possible to find novels, but
certainly the internet is not the best place to house a novel. Therefore these short forms of
cyberliterature can be split into three main branches:
1. Microfiction: with extremely short narrations (we will deal with it later on) 2. Micropoetry, with aphorisms and haikus, among other forms. 3. Microdrama, with very short dramatic texts, kind of role-plays, often even
monologues. The preferred format to publish these and other genres is blogs, to which we will also
devote a part of our paper.
Therefore a question immediately arises: What makes cyberliterature be so successful?
Due to its own nature, it is possible to set a few features that may help to explain why CyL
has spread so much during the last decade. Let's mention the ten main items that characterise
CyL:
1. Worldwide access. Texts can be accessed from anywhere around the world.
2. Immediate update. Authors can include any changes or modifications.
3. Immediate re-edition of contents.
4. Its briefness. Short texts are easily read on the screen. Long texts are not.
5. Frequent lack of a quality filter. That promotes self-edition.
6. Writers become publishers. That supposes a fully home-made literature.
7. Sites become a kind of magazine (blog), with an irregular periodicity.
8. A Creative Commons Licence is often added. Authors who try to provide their
edition task with a little bit of formality include this kind of licence.
9. Writers and readers may interact
10. It’s virtually free for both authors and readers.
As previously mentioned, blogs are the main vehicle to support cyberliterature and
microfiction. The fact of being friendly-user means has facilitated its rapid expansion and
favoured its choice as the favourite means to publish microstories. This is not the place where
to define what a blog is, but it is necessary to make a clear difference between literary and
not-literary blogs. The first ones have, obviously, a literary purpose to either promote literary
creation or deal with literary matters (critics, advertisement, etc.). We have just worked with
the first type of the aforementioned blogs.
Blogs work out as a kind of e-magazines furnished with posts. The success of a blog can
be measured by the number of visits, which involves an active commitment of the author.
We will now move on to look at genre.
1.3. Microfiction and Cyberliterature
The kind of literature we are working with could really be defined as cybermicrofiction,
so that the double reference to the internet and the length of the texts is clearly reflected in
this way.
This genre is also known under other names, among them flash fiction in the English
speaking countries, but we do not find it too accurate.
Not cybermicrofiction, but just microfiction has existed since the very beginnings of
written literature. Aesop's fables are an early sample of microfiction. The genre continued,
under other forms, in the medieval exempla and reached the 20th century, where it was
usually deemed as a minor form of literature. Major authors such as Kafka, Hemingway or
Borges cultivated it.
These are a few samples of microstories by the aforementioned authors:
"Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day.
At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running,
and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long
walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and
there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.
Franz Kafka
For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.
Ernest Hemingway
Cuando despertó, el dinosauro todavía estaba allí.
Augusto Monterroso
However, the birth of the internet enabled a renewed version of this kind of literature
which adapted itself to the needs of most citizens sunk in the frenzy of present day's life style,
where time is scarce and everybody is always in a hurry. In fact, microfiction is evolving,
currently as cybermicrofiction. Thus any attempt to enclose it under academic criteria is still
useless, since it is still too early to try to tag and dissect its multiple manifestations.
It was born some ten years ago, so it is impossible to foresee how it will evolve, even if
it will survive under its present forms; the only certainty is that it is spreading quickly
throughout the internet and it is even jumping into paper books, where it is only microfiction.
Regarding the length of the texts, there are different proposals of classification, since
not all the writings have the same extension, and the matter of how many words a story has
does matter here
1. Mini-story: up to one-page long
2. Micro-story: up to 150 words
3. Nano-story: up to 140 characters (based on Twitter system)
Only the nano-story standard is clearly established; as for the rest, their total length is
under discussion.
2. Working with (cyber)microfiction
2.1. Why to use (cyber)microfiction
Once we have introduced the literary raw material, the next step consists of exploiting it
in our language lessons.
For the last six years, we have been using (cyber)microfiction as an excellent
complement in our L2 lessons. Even some colleagues, encouraged by our positive experience,
have proved it in other academic levels, being the results more than satisfactory.
Both microfiction and cybermicrofiction have allowed us to make our students read in
spite of the well known lack of interest and motivation for reading existing especially among
high-school students.
Therefore, (cyber)microfiction has been a good tool to elicit both reading and writing,
because students get finally motivated to create their own microstories. The use of
(cyber)microfiction is not only positive for L2, but also for L1, but here we will just focus on
its exploitation in L2 lessons.
Our reasons to choose (cyber)microfiction instead of other types of texts can be
summarised as follows:
1. These kind of texts tend to be rather motivating
2. They are easily reachable
3. They are suitable for both children's and adults' literature
4. They offer a great deal of possibilities for exploitation
5. Basically the length of the texts makes them much more suitable to be
exploited in L2 lessons, especially with beginners, but not only.
Regarding the target students, it favours the autonomy of beginners, especially among
younger students. If the texts are rightly adapted, they can be worked by students of all ages,
from primary school until adults. As it was previously mentioned, microfiction has been used
by primary-school colleagues, though our own experience is rather related to higher-education
students. Students feel much more motivated to read, since they can understand the texts
much more easily.
2.2. Formats and sources of microfiction for class exploitation
Microfiction does not require an internet connection, which in certain cases could be
impossible. Even so, surfing the net is one of the motivations to work with microfiction,
mainly if our students are teenagers.
Therefore, it is possible to access texts from different sources, in which case the formats
may vary:
1 Online texts: usually taken from blogs. They just need to be printed. 2 Projected texts (with a beamer): presented as slides presentations. In this case it is
the teacher who must prepare the stuff. Slides also offer the chance to include
sound, i.e., it can be even become an audio-book. Presentations can also be
uploaded. 3 Booklets: texts are handed out in a home-made edition. In fact, slides can also be
printed in order to obtain a booklet. With younger students this allows us to make
up a kind of home-made booklets including illustrations – which can just be
photographs taken from the internet.
2.3. Suggestions to exploit (cyber)microfiction didactically
It is obvious there are dozens of different approaches and likelihoods to exploit any
text didactically. What we are going to show in a brief way is the process scheduled by us
along the last years, which follows an input-output pattern involving the four skills (reading,
writing, speaking and listening)
The input phase involves principally reading, listening and speaking, while the output
phase involves mainly writing. This division cannot be taken too strictly and is just an option
among many others.
Writing can certainly be also used in the first phase, as well as the other three options
can be used in the second phase, but we have decided to distribute the skills according to the
previous schedule, though we are aware that this procedure is not the only option, not even
the best one. That means that writing can be certainly used in the input phase, as well as
speaking, reading and listening can be used in the output phase
Our proposal of input activities is focused on two different phases: Skills Exploitation
and Linguistic Exploitation.
For the skills exploitation, the steps to follow are these:
1 Presentation and hand-out of the texts
• Online texts should be read out of the classroom, unless the teacher
considers it is better to read them in class (especially if working with
primary-school students)
• Slides can be read aloud in class but students should have a printed
copy available.
• Booklets can also be read at home.
2 Group work
• After-reading speaking activities.
• After-reading written activities (questionnaires).
For the linguistic exploitation activities, there are many options to work with the texts in
class, all of them perfectly known:
1. Activities focusing vocabulary
2. Drills
3. Fill-in the gaps
4. Activities focusing grammar
5. Drills
6. Rewriting
7. Dramatization (role-play) if possible, since not all texts are suitable to
be performed.
Our proposal for output activities aims to be an attempt to elicit a relatively literary
creation process, but we do not intend our students to become real writers, yet we do present
the writing process as a moment for fun, so students are proposed to create their own texts,
that is why writing takes up a crucial role in this last phase.
The creative process requires the writing of a set of texts, not just one. The length is to
be decided by the teacher depending on their students' background (knowledge, level,
motivation, abilities, age, etc.).
The formats to be used are the same ones we have been dealing with above: blogs,
slides and booklets. Students over 16 can be invited to open their own blog.
With competent students it is also possible to make Flash-format books by signing in on
the website of Issuu.com. Illustrations with pictures or photos are also welcome, since the
artistic side of the activity is much more important than it seems. Moreover, microstories will
be periodically written, several times along the school year, not just once or twice during the
course.
2.4. Before creating, warm-up
Writing requires training. It is not possible to write without having previously
practised how to write stories, which is much more than putting words together respecting the
grammar rules of a given language.
Paradoxically younger students usually need less training than adults in order to break
up writing. What writers call inspiration can come up at any moment; for that reason our
students ought to be ready to pick up their pen or their computer to set to write.
That is why, when dealing with grown-ups, it is convenient to propose a kind of warm-
up activities that will eventually allow them to create more easily. We have selected just three.
1. Write a story from a picture
Students are offered wordless pictures in order to create their story. The process can go
through a dialogue with the teacher and/or among the students about what they see on
the picture and how they interpret it. The goal is to elicit a story. These two pictures
were used with university students to provoke them to create a story based on what
they saw (see the pictures in the appendix at the end)
2. Interpret the vignettes
In this case, the story has already been told, it does have a plot, but the words are
missing. That is precisely what the students have to do, transform a pictorial story into
a written one (see the comic strip that was used for that purpose also included in the
appendix)
3. Rewriting
Students are now offered a real piece of news taken from a newspaper or magazine
(even from the internet). It is recommendable to choose hilarious events. The
following scrap is real and was used to motivate to transform a journalistic writing into
a literary microstory1.
Taiwanese woman to marry herself
A Taiwanese woman has decided to marry herself in an elaborate ceremony due to a lack
of potential suitors.
Chen Wei-yih said her mother had insisted on a groom at first but later jumped
aboard the solo marriage plan Photo: GETTY
4:41PM BST 22 Oct 201094 Comments
Chen Wei-yih has posed for a set of photos in a flowing white dress, enlisted a
wedding planner and rented a banquet hall for a marriage celebration with 30 friends.
Uninspired by the men she's met but facing social pressure to get married, the 30-
year-old office worker from Taipei will hold the reception next month.
"Age thirty is a prime period for me. My work and experience are in good shape,
but I haven't found a partner, so what can I do?" Chen said.
"It's not that I'm anti-marriage. I just hope that I can express a different idea within
the bounds of a tradition."
Her £3,600 wedding comes after online publicity campaign.
Once the teacher deems it is time to start writing, so that the required training period has
been successfully carried out, the inspiration matter must be faced up again. It is really tough
to motivate students to write when they decide they don't want to, but humour is always our
ally.
2.5. Some techniques to help students to create microstories
It is certainly quite difficult to motivate to create stories, even though they are so short.
Besides, techniques vary according to the students' age. For younger students Rodari's
techniques (Rodari 1973) can turn out quite suitable, yet these may also work with adults just
introducing the necessary modifications, so that they don't look like too childish.
1 Taken from Daily Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/taiwan/8080685/Taiwanese-woman-to-marry-
herself.html [02-Oct.-2012]
It is really complicated to cause the human brain to trigger to invent stories, but the
genius of Rodari has collected very basic techniques that have been used by hundreds of
writers and teachers to let ideas out. We have just selected a few of them, in this case mainly
young student-centered techniques (for primary-school).
1. The fantastic binomial
The fantastic binomial is the confrontation of two ideas, concepts, object, features or
people with no apparent relationship. Optionally two opposites can be joined to
provoke inspiration (for example what about a vegetarian lion? Or a giant gnome? Or
a two-eyed Cyclops? Try by using some of this:
• Frying-pan <> modem
• Shark <> tickle
• Pen <> liar
2. “What would happen if...?”
This technique brings up an impossible hypotheses to which students should give an
imaginative answer by means of a story. These are some ideas:
• What would happen if Santa Claus were fined for exceeding the speed limit
and his sleigh were confiscated?
• What would happen if you could paint smiles on people's faces?
• What would happen if suddenly the moon had hiccup?
3. The arbitrary prefix
The starting point is the existence of real forms such as washing-machine, vending-
machine, so that the proposal might turn around a new concept such as a yawning-
machine. Similarly with real prefixes: underword (as underworld), e- plant (as e-mail
or e-book).
4. The funny mistake
This a good way to exploit linguistic mistakes. Grammar mistakes allow to wake up
imagination.
• 3-star hotel > 3-hotel star
• Work clothes > working clothes (understood as clothes that work for
themselves)
Or even pronunciation mistakes:
• I think > I sink
As we have previously remarked, these techniques can also be used with teenagers and
adults, but with all the appropriate changes regarding vocabulary, circumstances and so on.
3. A specific proposal to use (cyber)microfiction with University students
3.1. Micro fiction in the classroom
As outlined above, both length and compatibility with online applications make micro
fiction an ideal genre for use in the classroom, whether in Primary, Secondary or Higher
Education settings. In terms of the latter, reading and writing micro pieces may be used in a
gamut of courses, including language (both mother-tongue and foreign) and Literature (Collie
1987). In what follows we will describe a teaching experience that relied heavily on micro
fiction as part of a course on reading and creative writing taught to Spanish teacher training
undergraduates. By sharing this experience, we hope to show how micro fiction reading and
writing exercises can help to develop foreign language skills and, perhaps no less important,
contribute to students’ cognitive development and critical thinking.
3.2. Background
This teaching experience took place at CES Don Bosco, an independent teacher
training college affiliated to Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The course, entitled
Reading and Creative Writing, is an elective course offered in year two of a Bachelors Degree
in Teacher Training, Primary Education. It is taught in English to students who are following a
bilingual stream, meaning that around 50% of their credit load is taught in English. Like in
other courses in the program, it is expected that students will improve their level of English
while (and through) studying course content, so the teaching relies on many principles and
strategies inspired from FL teaching methodology and Content and Language Integrated
Learning (CLIL) (Coyle 2010).
Given this background, the course had three types of aims:
a) Content aims, related mainly to literary criticism and creative writing skills, e.g. To re-
flect on the strategies and literary devices that build up successful pieces of fiction.
b) FL language aims, e.g. To help develop intensive reading skills.
c) Aims related to the development of teaching skills, e.g. To raise awareness on strate-
gies of teacher feedback to written tasks: responding, correction codes, focusing, etc.
3.3. Integrating micro literature in class-work
When planning the course, we took into account the lessons of a pilot experience that
had been run with English literature students the year before, a description of which has been
published elsewhere
2. Even if only three weeks of class-work were devoted to micro literature, some of the
lessons obtained suggested that it would be a good idea to turn that pilot experience into the
core component of another course.
One of those important lessons had been that, while students need to acquire a critical
lexicon in order to discuss and critique works of fiction meaningfully, such conceptual
framework should not be imposed or “taught” but, rather, arrived at inductively by students.
The reason is that most students tend to see literary discussion (not to mention creative
writing) as something alien to them, and hence it is of crucial importance that they see the
point in the judgments they are asked to make.
3.3.1. A debut in literary criticism
The first step of the process, then, was to set a number of readings from the different
on-line sources, mainly online literary journals and author weblogs3. After making sure they
understood the texts, the task students had to tackle was apparently simple: deciding whether
they liked the story or not, and, whatever the case, trying to decide what made each story
work.
Individual answers to this question, supplemented by subsequent class discussion, led
the class to cooperatively create a simple but comprehensive critical checklist of literary
virtues that a micro text could display. This list would serve as an aid for literary criticism of
subsequent readings, from other reputed writers to pieces written by peers in a later stage of
2 In a previous paper (López, 2011), one of the authors of this text presented an experience that high-
lighted the benefits of reading and writing micro fiction as a first step for developing students’ literary criticism skills.
3 Some of these sources include online journals staccatofiction.com, nanofiction.org, or Xavier Frías’s
weblog slonek.blogspot.com. [02-Oct. 2012]
the course4.
Moreover, the checklist was reassessed and edited to include additional categories
based on further experiences reading micro pieces, as well as after an intensive reading
activity on Camille Renshaw’s classic essay The Essentials of Microfiction.
3.3.2. Creative writing and publication
The second stage of the process involved having students create, edit and publish micro
pieces. It is here that the original pilot project turned into a fuller task-based unit, where
students learning would take place through and around an authentic project, namely, the
creation and use of literary journals using weblog applications.
The main aim of this project was to encourage team-work, editing processes and have
students publish a meaningful and authentic record of the different activities that took place in
class.
We will now take a quick look at some of these processes and activities, emphasizing how
they served as occasions for FL skills development.
a) Brainstorming and Drafting.
Most of the pieces produced were individual, although there was a team-writing activity. The
creative writing was structured around different “calls for stories”, which in turn specified
different themes and, most important, word count. For instance, the first set of stories were
produced following topics and word-count suggested by a writing prompt published in e-
journal nanofiction.org, in this case, “people in witness relocation program. Later stories were
written on topics proposed by the teacher or agreed on by the class.
b) Peer conference workshops
On specific dates, sessions would be devoted to oral interviews were students would be asked
to respond to their peers’ work. This was done in quite a structured way, by having students
fill in a conference record form, both as authors and as respondents5.
This was one of the students’ preferred class activities, as it allowed them to get to read a
4 One of the earlier versions of the checklist can be seen here,
http://microfictionces.blogspot.com.es/2011/09/micro-fiction-assessment-checklist.html [02-Oct.-2012] 5 The idea of the conference record is borrowed from Hollie Park’s Teaching Flash Fiction
http://lilt.ilstu.edu/rlbroad/teaching/studentpubs/writegooder/park.pdf [02-Oct.-2012].
good number of pieces written by their peers and receive suggestions on how to improve
their own work. From the instructor’s perspective, these workshops were one of the moments
in the course where the benefits of working on micro instead of longer fiction became clearer,
as 1.5 hours of class-work proved more than sufficient time for three or four interviews and
whole-class feedback at the end. And such variety helped – not only did students not get
distracted or bored, but they had more opportunities of sharing their stories and applying their
reading and critical skills on others’.
From a linguistic perspective, peer conference workshops provided an excellent occasion for
fluency development, as interview had to take place in English and students would constantly
utilize a number of language functions such as criticising politely, making suggestions, asking
for clarification, or encouraging.
c) Publication
Once students had several written and edited pieces, they were asked to publish them
on their group weblog. This stage of the project took place mainly outside the classroom,
although some guidance was given in class as to how to utilize weblog applications, mainly
blogger.com.
As has been suggested above, the rationale behind this task was to make it as authentic
as possible. Students were not simply creating an online record of their work for their
instructor to grade them, they were creating an online literary journal to share their stories
with their classmates and external readers. As such, they were encouraged to devote time and
thinking to issues of
i) Style: title,sub-title, background design and visuals.
ii) Readability: color, font size, etc.
iii) Functionality: labels to classify stories according to their author or subgenre.
Again, from a teacher’s perspective, this stage of the project was very rewarding, as
most student groups tried hard at personalizing their blogs’ appearance and making them as
readable and visually attractive as they could. (See appendix 2)
Furthermore, blog design and publication also helped to address the specific needs of students
who think in visual ways or are especially prone to creative.
d) Comments
As a follow up task, students were asked to read and comment on stories published in
other online journals. This was done by using the comments functionality of Blogger.
This task helped to reinforce understanding of the critical categories discussed, as well
as increasing students’ exposure to more texts –this time published by their peers.
e) Portfolio interview
In the field of ESOL, some language level exams apply a portfolio approach to
assessing writing skills and using students’ written work as a springboard for discussion in the
oral assessment. Our idea when planning this part of the course was to mirror such approach,
and hence provide students with practice in defending a published portfolio and answering
questions in a semi-formal setting. Due to the high number of students in class, the original
plan had to be simplified and, as a result, students were interviewed in groups, although they
still had to make mini (2 min) presentations on the theme, “what I have learnt in the creative
writing stage of this course”.
3.4. Other activities
Even if most of the learning activities were structured around the project that has been
described in the above section, other activities and resources were used, either as “drills” to
help students in their writing processes, or as activities designed to help students reflect on the
possible uses of creative writing in the Primary classroom.
a) Group brainstorms as warming-up activities.
Often as a way of waking students up (quite literally, as sessions always took place
early in the morning) and allowing for late-comers, the class would begin with short group
brainstorms on very specific tasks. On several occasions, students were asked to propose
metaphors or similes to illustrate daily scenarios. Other times, they would be shown images or
even short videos as “text starts” and were asked to speculate on what they saw, or what the
story behind (or after) could be. Here, some language support was given to help students
utilize appropriate expressions for speculating, such as modal verbs and expressions of
probability (e.g. “That could be… / I guess that’s…./ He must have….)
b) Interaction with a wider community
One of the most quoted principles of CLIL is the focus on “Community”. In this
course, students were encouraged to see their work in the course as part of a wider, real-life
community in several ways. One day, Xavier Frías, writer and blogger and co-author of this
paper, was invited to join the class to briefly lecture on micro literature and discuss some of
his fiction with students. Students were generally excited to meet a “real” writer whose fiction
they had enjoyed and discussed in class.
Moreover, even after the course had finished, some of the students helped the college’s
Language Department organize a micro story competition. Among other tasks, they were
entrusted with the responsibility of shortlisting the best 10 submissions.
In both cases, students were able to see that reading and creative writing need not be a high-
brow quasi mystical activity, but that it can contribute to strengthen communal links, for
instance, in a school.
c) Essay-writing.
Finally, students received training in essay-writing skills in English, and had to write
an essay entitled “my process of writing”, in which they had to describe on their individual
writing processes, from brainstorming and focusing to editing and publishing.
3.5. Suggestions of improvement
In previous sections we have highlighted the many benefits of engaging students in
reading and creative writing using micro literature, especially in the framework of meaningful
project-work. However, as in other cases of task-based instruction, care must be taken to
adequately plan language aims, especially those involving grammar structures or functional
language. In our specific experience, there was a general lack of grammatical control and
accuracy in many publications and, especially in written comments to peer work. This is
clearly an area of improvement, which could also be pursued collaboratively, for instance, by
having students self and peer correct their language use more carefully via correction codes.
3.6. Benefits of using micro fiction
We will now summarize the main benefits of using micro fiction in teaching,
especially in literature, creative writing and EFL courses.
1. Micro fiction makes it easier to expose students to significant variety. And variety is
important when studying literature, as authors get things right in very different ways.
2. Micro pieces are an extremely flexible teaching material. You can use them in class
for intensive reading activities. You can set their reading for homework and even busy
mature students will find the time and energy to read them.
3. Micro stories are ideal as a non-intimidating first adult experience in creative writing.
4. As has been discussed in the first section of this paper, micro literature feels very
much at home on the Internet, computer screens and even mobile phones (especially
nano fiction), which is where people do most of their reading nowadays.
5. This very short genre allows for realistic team writing and peer editing activities re-
quiring little or no homework.
6. Having students publish in blogs (individually or group managed) fosters creativity
caters to students with a visual learning style.
4. Conclusion
To conclude this paper, we would like to insist on the idea that (cyber)microfiction is
interesting for itself, as a brand-new literary movement, but also because of its multiple
didactic possibilities. We have already been working with very short texts in our L2 classes
for several years, so we can utter that the use of these materials will facilitate students to learn
foreign languages. Do not forget that our younger students belong to the so-called digital
generation and this kind of texts is not alien to them.
As we hope to have shown, micro literature can be an exciting and highly versatile
resource for teaching a foreign language (especially English) and developing cognitive skills
in students in a variety of subject-areas in the Humanities. Furthermore, the close relationship
of this literary genre with the new technologies and, especially, the Internet, make it ideal for
transmitting students a passion for reading and storytelling that is traditional in its spirit but
new in its language. And, whatever the scenarios, humanistic approaches to education cannot
fail to speak to students in a language they can understand.
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nas literatures ibéricas: o caso da microficción.” Revista de lenguas y literaturas
catalana, gallega y vasca, 2010, vol.15, p. 77-87. Available here: http://e-
spacio.uned.es/fez/view.php?pid=bibliuned:Llcgv-2010-vol.15-05
Lagmanovich, D. “La extrema brevedad: microrrelatos de una y dos líneas”, in Espéculo 32,
2006 [cit June 28, 2012] http://www.ucm.es/info/especulo/numero32/exbreve.html
López, A. “Learning to Read, Learning to Write: An Experience in Using Microfiction with
Spanish EFL Teacher Trainees”, in ICERI Proceedings. IATED. 2011
Marsh Renshaw, C. The Essentials of Microfiction, in Pif Magazine. Published 1 june 1998.
http://www.pifmagazine.com/1998/06/the-essentials-of-microfiction/
Rodari, G. Grammatica della fantasia, Einaudi:Torino, 1973.
Sharma, P. & Barrett, B.. Blended Learning. Using technology in and beyond the language
classroom. Oxford: Macmillan, 2007
Reference blogs
Alquisa
www.alqisa.blogspot.com
Fracaso de microcuentos
http://www.microcuentos.org
Microstorias
www.eonaviego.blogspot.com
NANO Fiction
http://nanofiction.org
Přiběhy na padesat slov
http://pribehynapadesatslov.cz/
Slonek
http://slonek.blogspot.com
Staccato Fiction
http://staccatofiction.com
140 Letras
http://140.zip.net/
Xavier Frías Conde, UNED (Spain)
Doctor of Romance Philology, works at the Spanish UNED, where he teaches Romance
languages and Linguistics. He is also a writer, deeply committed with cyberliterature. He
began to write microstories in 2008. Besides he collaborates with the Catalan Lectorate of
Charles University in Prague. As a writer, he has published more than two dozens of literary
works in several languages.
Alfonso López, CES Don Bosco (Spain)
A.L. holds a Bacherlor of Arts from Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), a PhD from
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and CELTA from Cambridge University. He works at
CES Don Bosco Education College (Madrid) as a teacher trainer, and coordinates the
Bilingual (English-Spanish) degree programs. His main areas of interest are contemporary
English literature and, more recently, teaching methodology in bilingual environments and
programs. He publishes micro literature in Spanish and English online, at
www.microcuentos.org.
Appendix
1. Pictures
Wordless Vignette
2. Blogs