Nicolás Guillén's "El gran zoo" (1967), illustrated by Fayad Jamís, was the first Hispanic bestiary to prominently feature humans in a space traditionally inhabited by beasts. Guillén's verses transform the bestiary from a didactic tool used for centuries to instruct and uniform society into a subversive text that openly denounces the…

Cristina Fernández Cubas's short story "La nueva vida" ("La habitación de Nona" 2015) foregrounds the play between truth and fiction, past and present, and death and identity, where the widowed protagonist finds meaning not in philosophy, but in physics. Widowed in 2007 at age 62, Fernández Cubas focalized this story through…

Established in Catalonia in 2005, Cinema en curs is now one of the most significant film education projects worldwide. This article places selections from interviews conducted in early 2021 with project founders and directors Núria Aidelman and Laia Colell within a critical context drawing upon international considerations of film education,…

Identity currently features as a prominent theme in digital multimodal composition (DMC), given the significant impact of DMC on identity expression. However, L2 learners' writer identity development and fluctuation in this type of textual composition needs further exploration in light of the absence of clearly established DMC-specific identity…

Nobody doubts the importance of digital influencers when it comes to the selection and acquisition of new products and services. In the specific field of literary reading, literary blogs, booktubers and specialized websites that act as prescribers of reading stand out. This study presents a descriptive research model in which a multivariate…

Since the beginning of literary time, genre has been an issue for critics and scholars. Comics and graphic novels have stepped into the fray in recent decades causing even more confusion. This is even more evident in Spain where the publishers are foolhardy men and women simply out to make money and who are too deeply embedded in their bourgeois…

It has long been thought that encouraging children to read is likely to be beneficial for the development of their literacy skills. However, a lot less attention has been paid to the issue of whether what students read matters for their academic progress. This paper therefore considers the association between the frequency young people read five…

Learning to compose texts adequate for different purposes is crucial for becoming literate. We examined developmental changes in the rhetorical structure of written texts produced by Spanish children throughout the early years of elementary school in the light of descriptive writing purposes. Children had also performed tasks to test…

This study attempts to relate faculty feelings towards writing with writing genres, perceived competences and values associated to writing. 67 foreign languages faculty in Colombia and Spain voluntarily filled in a four-section on-line questionnaire entitled "The Writing Feelings Questionnaire." All the sections were Likert Scale type.…

Across the centuries, the question of the origin of language has captivated the human imagination. Many theories have been proposed to address fundamental questions such as: Where do languages come from? How do they evolve? What are the societal drivers of this change? Historically, one of the biggest challenges in addressing these questions has…

This essay seeks to provide parallel and interchangeable approaches to teaching Ramon del Valle-Inclan's challenging play "Luces de bohemia". A greater understanding of the cultural and mental frameworks of the early twentieth-century Spanish spectator will permit students to penetrate the dense intertextuality that characterizes Valle's…

This paper describes two innovative experiences with ICT in teacher training by means of the development of two blogs about children's and young adults' literature. The study of both activities shows the usefulness of blogs in higher education and their contribution to the linguistic and literary training of future teachers. The results show that…

At the beginning of the twentieth century a new subgenre of poetry written in Spanish, but rooted in Japanese literary tradition, began to emerge in the works of Spain's vanguard and Generation of 1927 poets and among young modernist poets in Mexico and South America. Transmitted first through France and later directly from Japan, the popularity…

This paper deals with the role of both the teacher and the student when choosing materials for the course, more specifically, with the selection of books for extensive reading. Although carried out in a first year tertiary education level, the results of this small scale study could be a good starting point for reflection in previous secondary and…

This article considers Guillermo Del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" as a text which utilises key codes and conventions of children's literature as a means of encountering the trauma of Fascism. The article begins by placing "Pan's Labyrinth" at a contextual crossroads involving fairy tale and a Spanish cinematic tradition and…