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