LEARNING TO READ, LEARNING TO WRITE: AN EXPERIENCE IN USING MICROFICTION WITH SPANISH EFL TEACHER TRAINEES

Microfiction, while increasingly popular among writers and bloggers, is still largely ignored by higher learning courses outside the field of creative writing. And yet, as very short fiction (how short it should be depends on who defines it, but most definitions agree on 1000 words as the upper limit) offers teachers and learners a number of advantages that make it ideal for classroom application in a number of fields, including literary criticism, critical thinking development and language teaching.

This presentation describes a real teaching experience where microfiction (defined for class purposes as fiction under 500 words in length) was used as a tool to help EFL teacher training students in Spain to develop basic skills in literary criticism, as well as an opportunity to practice their written English. It was found that focusing on this literary genre enhanced the learning process significantly. On the one hand, the fictional pieces chosen lent themselves particularly well to collaborative learning in-class activities such as text discussion and correction. On the other, students were able to publish some of their creative work on a weblog, where discussion and literary criticism took place following guidelines and criteria that were established collaboratively in class. Hence it can be safely said that microfiction is a literary genre particularly well suited to blended learning scenarios in language teaching and across the humanities.