Colorín Colorado: Introducción a la literatura juvenil hispana by Anne González (review)

Colorín Colorado: Introducción a la literatura juvenil hispana is a good alternative textbook choice for an intermediate to advanced Spanish language course. It consists of four thematic units (“Identity,” “Love,” “Society,” and “Loss”). Each of these units are expanded upon through supplementary materials and literary glossaries.

The book is an original selection of literary texts, short stories or excerpts from various works. Anne González has done an excellent job of incorporating authors from almost every country in the Hispanic world. Some of these writers are renowned, as is the case with Modernists Rubén Darío and José Martí; some other authors are not commonly included in textbooks or literary anthologies, like Costa Rican authors Carmen Lyra and Joaquín Gutiérrrez.

Colorín Colorado could have a variety of uses in the classroom. The potential users of this book range from students at an advanced level of high school instruction to an intermediate or advanced level of college instruction. Colorín Colorado would fit perfectly in a conversation class, and/or an intermediate and advanced composition class, where writing skills are developed. The textbook incorporates clearly the four fundamental skills for foreign language learning: listening, reading, speaking, and writing. The book includes colorful illustrations, creative games, practice exercises, and discussion questions for every story, which promotes listening, reading and speaking. For writing, section 4 of each unit, “Sugerencias para profesores,” includes a theme to develop an essay.

The textbook includes literary works that are intended for general audiences and not exclusively for young readers, nevertheless. The short story of Peruvian poet César Vallejo, Paco Yunque is an example, or Mario Benedetti’s “El hombre que aprendió a ladrar.” However, these stories only enhance the volume.

Regarding the methodology, even though the author does not clarify it, the activities are designed for the instructor to build an eclectic approach. The predominance of activities that would benefit the student when following some approaches and techniques over others is noticeable. From a lexical approach to task-based activities or even grammar and translation, the instructor is given a ground to design his/her class with a set of helpful activities. If deciding on one method, the Cooperative Language Learning Approach stands out as part of the philosophical methodology of the book. This approach poses that learning is built within the social exchange and promotes communicative interaction in the classroom along with peer tutoring, as well as development of learning and communication strategies.

The inclusion of Francisco Morales Santos’s “El Popol Vuh” for children and the Taíno legend by Juan Bosch “La Ciguapa” is remarkable. It is paramount that education in the field of Spanish offers a diverse and enriched variety of literary texts within the field of Hispanic literature. Especially nowadays in a globalized world, it has been given more importance to open the students’ cultural horizons. As stated by the author, “one of the explicit goals of this text is to question many of the commonly held conceptions and stereotypes about children, childhood, and children’s literature” (xiii). It is indeed crucial to read texts about the indigenous and pre-Hispanic cultures and traditions; these works are fundamental to understand the literatures and cultures of Latin America as a whole.

The subtitle of the book as “Introducción a la literatura juvenil hispana,” though, could be misleading. One may think that it is a book for an advanced undergraduate level course on jóvenes adultos or adolescent literature in Spanish. This is not a textbook for a specialized course on this genre and certainly not an introduction for this field. The supplementary material lacks the excerpt or work mentioned on this chapter, due to copyright issues. This gap creates somewhat of a void and discontinuity in the textbook structure.

Summarizing, this is an innovative textbook that uses mostly stories dedicated to young readers written in Spanish...