In the Assignment of short stories, the students read narratives written by Latin American authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, and Julio Cortázar, where the mundane and the extraordinary are blended and the lines between the real and unreal are undefined. Students enhanced their interpretive reading skills by closely paying attention to the details of the stories and practiced their interpersonal speaking skills during the daily discussions about the narratives and the characters’ traits and motivations. 

As students collaborated in small groups to adapt Cortázar’s tale of parallel worlds, reality vs. dream, into an audiovisual story, José Venutolo, a faculty from New York Film Academy, helped the students through the process of creating a storyboard, writing a script, editing and adding sound and visual effects — all in Spanish! The end result of this hands-on experience, which linked each small group’s adapted segment of the story into a complete film, demonstrated the students’ fine interpretive reading skills, enhanced speaking skills, cultural understanding, and their highly creative skills in imagining scenes with the resources and the environment available and when recreating dialogues.