This paper focuses on integrating multimodal communication into the English-as-a-foreign-language classroom to enhance the development of students' multimodal communicative competence, multiliteracies, and 21st-century skills. To do so, I compiled a corpus of authentic materials from Lady Whistledown's Society Papers in Julia Quinn's novel…

This article looks at an experience within the context of distance higher education, which has incorporated the reading of two novelettes (short novels, commonly known as novellas) created on an ad hoc basis for two subjects of a Criminology degree course. The goal of this research is to analyse students' perceptions of their validity as a study…

The explosion of interest in the recovery of historical memory in Spain seeks to address many decades of silence and forgetting during the years of the Franco dictatorship and afterwards. Working with trauma theory, Michel Foucault's understanding of silence as discourse, as well as queer theory's exploration of silence as strategy and power, this…

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…

"Atlas de Geografía Humana" constitutes a critique of the much vaunted notion of a progressive Spain that has rectified the gender inequalities of the Francoist era, as one of the highly educated and successful protagonists, Fran, unwittingly adopts her mother's alignment with patriarchal norms. This novel elucidates the incompatibility…

In 2005, Spanish television audiences saw the debut of the nation's first spinoff, the sitcom "Aída." The show featured the tribulations of its title character and her working-class family in their struggle to "llegar a fin de mes." It seemed to promise a sensibility enacted in the US series "Roseanne," where another…

Bilingual Education is a must in Spain nowadays. Its implementation during the past ten years has involved a meaningful change in teaching methodology. For the first time now our students have the chance to speak and to listen to the target language before they start mastering grammar. As part of this process, English literature is being…

The article analyzes the portrayal of the male perpetrator of heterosexual domestic violence in a selection of contemporary Spanish texts (novel, drama, and autobiography) that form part of a clearly discernible cultural response to the issue of intimate partner violence in Spain today. It reads the figure of the abuser in conjunction with a range…

"The Explorer of the Chest" and "Golgrim's Keys" are two original, unabridged texts integrated in the Scarecrow Project. The project aims at developing ground-breaking methodologies for teaching literature and covers the A2-B2 levels of language competence, both in English and Spanish. The project is based on an integrated use…

Nation (2006) has calculated that second language (L2) learners require much more vocabulary than previously thought to be functional with language (e.g., 8,000-9,000 word families to read independently). This level is far beyond the highest graded reader, and would be difficult to explicitly teach. One way for learners to be exposed to…

While working to finish the first chapter of her dissertation, Robin Smiles was offered the opportunity to travel oversees. As a chaperone for a group of college students to Athens, Greece, she was free to pursue research for the first chapter of her dissertation, once she had successfully accompanied the students to Athens and assisted with their…

Continuing series on contemporary Spanish authors. Covers the writings of Alonso Zamora Vicente, Ramon de Garciasol, Julio Manegat, Concha Castroviejo, Carlos Muniz, and Angel Palomino Jimenez. (DS)

The work of a number of American literary critics on the novels of contemporary Spanish women are reviewed. It is argued that the criticism generally suffers from ethnocentrism and lacks insight into the reality of the lives of Spanish women. The works of Matute, Martin, Gaite, and Quiroga, among others, are discussed. (EF)

The 2008 Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, a joint conference with the Michigan World Language Association, focused on learning about the diverse backgrounds and needs of today's students and discovering new ways to help them succeed in reaching the goal of language proficiency. A wide variety of workshops and…