A few weeks ago, I did a giveaway that required teachers to write short stories in order to enter. There were so many fun little stories that I just had to find something to do with them. And so I did. Then, Profe Vecchitto shared a hilarious story that her class created working from my Búscalo script. It was about me having a talking fridge that gives me ideas for Spanish lessons, and she shared it in the SOMOS group. The best part was that in the story, I had a dumb brother named Benjamin. Well, unbeknownst to her students, I actually do have a brother named Benjamin! (Although he is not dumb–he is a super genius and super hilarious!) In reading that story and the stories that came out of the blog post, an idea for a new project began to emerge….

On any given day of the week, there are hundreds of stories being created by individual Spanish students and Spanish classes throughout the world. One Word Images, Free Writes, TPRS stories, PQA Gone Wild…so many stories! And all of them learner-friendly because they are created by language learners!!

What if we could gather the best, most compelling of these stories and share them? What could that do for our collective efforts to increase the amount of accessible texts for pleasure reading in the earliest stages of language acquisition?

I think we can! To that end, I want to introduce you to my newest project:

LITERAL will be a free, monthly e-zine with texts created by language learners, for language learners. The title and the logo concept come from Nelly Hughes, who is always so generous to help me with my projects! (She has worked with various authors and publishers in a consulting and writing role over the years, and her own materials are available in the Comprendes Mendez Spanish Shop.)

Each month, students can submit short stories that they have written on their own or in class, reviews of books that they have read and enjoyed, or nominate their teacher for Spanish Teacher of the Month—all in Spanish, of course! Additional features will be added as the publication develops.

LITERAL is an authentic learner publication. The content is created by language learners, for language learners.

LITERAL is easy to understand. The target Literal reader is in Spanish 1 or 2. The publisher (me) will edit all submissions in order to maximize comprehensibility of content.

LITERAL is free. All content carries a CC-BY-SA-NC 3.0 license, allowing the content to be shared and modified freely with attribution and with the same license. The content may never be sold.

LITERAL is not intended for classroom use. Readers are encouraged to subscribe on their own and read because they want to, outside of class!

So…what does this mean for you, dear Spanish teacher?

The goal is to get your students to subscribe themselves to the e-zine so that they will have access to learner-friendly texts to read on their own, at their leisure. Don’t worry–I am not trying to take advantage of their readership; this magazine is not monetized in any way: no ads, no fees, nothing! It’s FREE.

Please share the REVISTA LITERAL website with your students: www.revistaliteral.com. Encourage them to subscribe on their own (Click the “Menú” icon, then click “SUBSCRIBIRSE” and enter an email address). Once subscribed, they will receive notifications of submission deadlines and newly published issues, in addition to any bonus readings that I post directly to the website! You are welcome to subscribe, too, of course 🙂

I intend to publish the first issue on or around November 1, and the deadline for submissions is October 20. The link to submit texts for publications for the 11/1 issue is in this Bienvenid@s post.

To see a preview, click here!

23 replies on “Revista Literal: Free e-zine for Spanish students!”

  2. Thank you! I love this idea! This will go well the incentives chart I use to encourage students to use their Spanish outside of class. I did want to point that in the preview issue, I think there’s a typo in the second paragraph of the first story. You refer to a girl named Carina, but I think it’s supposed to be Martina?

    Thanks for all you do!

    Tammy Bac

    Reply

      1. Thank you! Check out my Media & Journalism ESL student-only written articles. Efsantabarbara news.com. I bet your students could do the same in Spanish! We use WordPress, too! I am still in the beginning stages of the class and learning about WordPress, so any suggestions or sources are welcome! Thanks! Roz

  4. This is an awesome idea!!! I love that you are always coming up with ways to hook students and keep them using the target language outside of class!

    Reply

  8. Any way we can submit original artwork to accompany our stories? My students sometimes write stories about characters they create (One Word Images a la Ben Slavic and Tina Hargaden). Their art should accompany the text…

    Reply
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  10. As a teacher, can I submit my students’ class stories? I would like to use this as an opportunity to read through all of their past stories together, and let them vote on their favorite to send in. This is my 5th year teaching K-8 Spanish, so it would be fun to look through their stories from past years. Also, we rewrite song lyrics. Would that be ok to send in, or would it be against copyright licenses, since it is based on a copyrighted song? Thank you so much for this resource and incentive to get students excited about their stories and writing!

    Reply

  12. This is so AMAZING! I have several students who mentioned that they want to be writers/authors one day…they can start now! Thank you so much for your dedication to engaging language learning and supporting those of us who are less creative! 🙂 You and your colleagues are true inspirations!

    Reply

  13. Martina…as a classroom activity, we had students (5 Spanish II) write fictional stories to submit to Literal. The way our school’s firewall works is that the students are not able to subscribe to the newsletter or upload their stories via google forms as outlined on the website. Is there a better way to submit as a batch?

    Reply
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