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!
