Author Guidelines

Scope of Publication

Spanish and Portuguese Review (SPR), the annual graduate student journal of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP), invites the submission of original, unpublished manuscripts on culture, film, linguistics, literature, pedagogy, second language acquisition, translation, and other areas related to the study or teaching of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian languages and cultures. Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods of research are encouraged. In addition to traditional research and theory-based articles, SPR welcomes the submission of interviews, response articles (particularly those that respond to work published in the AATSP publications Hispania and SPR), interviews, notes from the classroom, and book/tool reviews. All submissions should display thorough and comprehensive knowledge of the subject and field in question; be written in Spanish, Portuguese, or English; and strictly adhere to the journal’s guidelines.

Types of Submissions

Traditional Research and Theory-Based Articles. These are the types of articles graduate students may be most familiar with from coursework or their own research. While the format and approach of these articles may vary by discipline, they must be original, unpublished manuscripts on culture, film, linguistics, literature, pedagogy, second language acquisition, translation, and other areas related to the study or teaching of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian languages and cultures. Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods of research are encouraged. Article submissions must be between 3,000 and 6,000 words, excluding footnotes and works cited.

Response Articles. Response articles are typically short-form and respond directly to an article already in print. In this type of essay, the author re-evaluates a previously published conclusion from a new perspective or points out theories and approaches that would enhance readers’ understanding of the original article. We particularly seek response articles that respond to work previously published in the AATSP publications Hispania and SPR.

For example, see Coda (2020) in SPR.

Interviews. Graduate students may choose to submit interviews with major authors and scholars in their field that may be of interest to the general readership. All interviews must include an introduction that contextualizes the topic(s) of the interview that follows. Depending upon the extent of that introduction, an interview submission may or may not include a Works Cited list. See below for more information on formatting and style questions for interview submissions.

For example, see Johnson (2018) in Dimension.

Notes from the Classroom. Graduate students who teach may be interested in submitting reflections on teaching based on their own analyses and/or evidence from their own classrooms. This category may also include short-form analyses with clear implications for the classroom.

For examples, see Quiñones Maldonado (2018) in SPR and Graebner Shepin (2019) in Hispania.

Book or Tool Reviews. Books released within the last three years as well as other media, technologies, and tools can be reviewed for SPR. Graduate students can propose an idea for a review to the Managing Editor of Book and Tool Reviews or submit their review for consideration via Submittable. Additionally, if authors want to publish a review in their field but do not have a book or tool in mind, SPR editors can work with prospective reviews authors to identify an appropriate work. Like articles, reviews also go through a formal review process prior to being selected for publication in the journal: they are evaluated by anonymous readers and publication decisions are based upon their comments and the discretion of the editors. See below for more guidelines and information on formatting and style questions for book and tool review submissions.

For examples, see Amado (2020) in SPR or Hemsath (2021) in SPR.

General Submission Requirements

Graduate Student Status. Spanish and Portuguese Review will only accept submissions from individuals who have graduate student status at the time of submission. Work from professors or undergraduate students will not be reviewed for publication in the journal. The only exceptions to this norm will be at the invitation of the SPR Editor (such as in the case of guest editorials that may come from experts in the field addressing topics of general interest to graduate students).

AATSP Membership Required. Current membership in the AATSP is a requirement for submission and must be maintained by the author(s) until an accepted manuscript appears in print. Please visit www.aatsp.org to become a member or renew your membership. The AATSP also offers a new group rate for Departments with graduate programs. For additional information, please contact the AATSP National Office at AATSPoffice@aatsp.org or 248 – 960 – 2180.

Anonymity Required. When submitting your manuscript via Submittable, please ensure that no identifying information (name, institution, etc.) appears in the file name, title, or body of the submission. Please refer to the name of your institution and/or the institution where your research was conducted as “XXXX”, so that you can quickly find the reference to replace it with the correct name when you prepare a final version of your article for submission. Please also wait to include acknowledgments or notes regarding earlier versions of the manuscript (i.e., as a conference paper) until your article has been accepted for publication. Personal information will be collected during the submission process, and should not appear in the initial article you submit.

File Name. Please name the file using the submission type (article, interview, review, etc.) followed by an abbreviated version of the title (four word maximum). Example: A book review of García Lorca at the Edge of Surrealism might have the following file name: Review_Garcia_Lorca_Surrealism.docx

Submission Format. All submissions should be formatted as a completely anonymous document that includes (in this order): title, abstract, keywords, text, any automated footnotes (not endnotes), works cited, any appendix materials, and any images or tables, using the language of the submission.

Submission Length. Article manuscripts and interviews should be between 3,000 and 6,000 words, excluding footnotes and works cited. The length of final, accepted articles, after revision, may deviate from this, but initial submissions should fit within this word limit. Reviews are typically between 1000-1500 words. Reviewers and editors may request that you adjust the paper length during the review process.

Submission Language. Submissions to Spanish and Portuguese Review will be accepted in Spanish, Portuguese, or English. Please do not translate quotations in those languages. Quotations appearing in languages other than Spanish, Portuguese, or English must be translated into the language of the article and be included in the body of the text; the original should be included as a footnote, whose reference number should immediately follow the in-text translation. Quotations in Spanish, Portuguese, or English should remain in those languages regardless of the language of the article text. Authors of linguistics and pedagogy articles have the option of supplying sample utterances in two languages with the translation directly following in single quotation marks.

Copyright Permissions. Authors must obtain any necessary permissions for copyrighted materials to be included in a submission before the review process can commence. All images (including film stills) must include written permission for use, even if those images appear to be in the public domain.

Institutional Review Board. All submitted research using human subjects (surveys, experimental studies, ethnographic studies, etc.) must first receive Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval. Although the responsibility of obtaining IRB approval and following its guidelines remains with the author(s) of any submission, Spanish and Portuguese Review reserves the right to ask for documentation as evidence of compliance with IRB regulations. For more information, please visit http://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/hs/training.htm, click on protecting human research participants, click on registration, create an account, and complete the modules. You will receive a certificate upon successful completion. NOTE: The certificate does not provide IRB approval. This is a separate process that can be completed through your institution’s IRB office.

Review Process

All submissions to Spanish and Portuguese Review will receive a preliminary review by its editors to ensure that all submission requirements are met. Given the expected volume of submissions, not all submissions will be selected for a complete review, even if they meet the submission requirements.

Following the preliminary review, select manuscripts will go through a double-anonymous peer review process, where neither the author nor the reviewer knows the other’s identity.

IMPORTANT: Though comments from peer reviewers are invaluable in informing publication decisions, positive evaluations do not necessarily mean that a manuscript will be published, even after numerous revisions. “Publishable” manuscripts are at times rejected for various reasons (e.g., when the journal receives multiple manuscripts on the same topic).

Style and Formatting

Basic Guidelines

Below are basic style and formatting guidelines. Please contact the SPR Editor at spr@aatsp.org with additional questions.

We mirror the style requirements of Hispania, our sister publication through the AATSP. As such, we follow the most current MLA style for all articles. The style of articles in linguistics and language science is slightly modified: 1) in-text citations include the year of the publication and the page number of the citation: e.g., Schmidt (1996) notes… (23) or (Schmidt 1996: 23); and 2) entries in the list of works cited include the year in parenthesis directly after the author’s name: e.g., Schmidt, Donald. (1996).

The OWL Purdue Online Writing Lab offers an easy-to-follow guide on MLA style.

Here are additional general style and formatting reminders for all submissions:

  • Do not use all caps for titles.
  • Your article should be single-spaced.
  • Please use Times New Roman, font size 12. (NOTE: Authors of linguistics and pedagogy articles may need to use a different font in order to get the phonetic characters to convert. In these cases, please send both a Word and a PDF file to ensure that any special characters display properly.)
  • Do not include macros, section breaks, or text boxes in your document.
  • Per MLA, use italics instead of underlining.
  • Use only one space after all punctuation.
  • Please use left-justification for all manuscripts. Do not use block format, as to avoid confusion with hyphenation at the right margin.
  • Use automatic footnotes (not endnotes).
  • Include any accompanying images in the highest resolution possible as separate files along with your original submission.

Book/Tool Review Guidelines

When writing a book, media, or tool review for Spanish and Portuguese Review, please keep in mind the following content guidelines:

  • The review should provide a description of the content for the book, media, or website and critical commentary. The review should not be merely descriptive or analytical, but provide both types of information.
  • Any negative criticism should be directed toward the contents of the book and not toward the author personally. Furthermore, critiques (positive or negative) must be supported with clear evidence that supports the claims made. Avoid unduly severe language, as well as the appearance of an “unbalanced” review (i.e., strive for objectivity and fairness).
  • Reviewers should not allude to their own work in the book/media review.
  • Reviewers should not include a Works Cited list in the review. In-text citations including quotations of the work being reviewed are permitted. However, extensive quotations from the work should be avoided.
  • Avoid language that may be construed as sexist (e.g., “A student may find that he cannot follow the text,” or “The reader will notice his attention lagging.”). The singular neutral form (they, their, etc.) are preferable to he/she, his/her, s/he, and similar constructions.

Additionally, please make sure that you provide complete and accurate publication information for the book or media item you are reviewing, as shown in the examples below:

Book

[Author.] [Complete book title.] [Place of publication: Publisher, date.] [Pp. #.] [ISBN.]

Alvarez Borland, Isabel, and Lynette M. F. Bosch, eds. Cuban-American Literature and Art. Albany: SUNY P, 2009. Pp. 224. ISBN 978-0-7914-9373-1.

Media

[Author.] [Media title.] [Place: Publisher, date.] [Media type.] [Length.]

Hindson, Jean M. Training Our Future Elementary World Language Teachers: An Interactive Immersion-Based Communicative Approach to Teaching World Languages at the Elementary Level. La Crosse: Educational Technologies, U of Wisconsin-La Crosse, 2006. DVD. 1:37:01.

Website

[Author/Organization.] [Website title/Description.] [Date, if available.] [Pages, if available and applicable.]

[complete website address.]

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Website in Spanish and Portuguese.

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/spanish/

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/portuguese/

Interview Guidelines

All interviews must include an introduction that contextualizes the topic(s) of the interview that follows. Depending upon the extent of that introduction, an interview submission may or may not include a Works Cited list.

In the actual interview section, please use the full name of the interviewer and interviewee in the first instance, and then use initials to identify speakers for the remainder of the interview. Both full names and initials should be bolded. For example:

Angela Nelson: When did you know you were a writer?

Mario Vargas Llosa: …

AN: …

MVL: …

Common Additional Style Concerns

Capitalization

  • All manuscripts should follow the capitalization rules of the language in which they are written.
  • When referring to titles of other texts in the body of the manuscript or the works cited, follow the standard capitalization norms of the language in which they are written (English, Spanish, or Portuguese).
  • Foreign words within an English title should be capitalized (e.g., “The Importance of Teaching Ser and Estar”).
  • Subtitles should be introduced in all cases with a colon and the first word of the subtitle should be capitalized for all languages (e.g., Revolución cubana: Historia, conflictos y desafíos).
  • Do not capitalize parts of a book (e.g., preface, chapter, etc.).
  • Do capitalize references to sections, tables, etc., within the article (e.g., Table 1, Appendix 2).

 Abbreviations

  • Avoid the use of abbreviated names (Wm., Chas., G. Lorca, etc.).
  • Do not use initials in place of titles (e.g., write out Libro de buen amor rather than LBA).
  • Avoid using abbreviations (FL, L1, etc.) in titles and abstracts.
  • Always introduce the complete word or phrase before using the abbreviation.
  • Never start a sentence with an abbreviation: “Second-language production is essential. . . ,” but not “L2 production is essential. . . .”
  • Only abbreviate “United States” when it is used as an adjective (in which case, the abbreviation should not use periods): “The US trade agreement,” but “The trade agreement with the United States.”

Punctuation and Diacritical Marks

  • All articles in Spanish must conform to the latest standards of the Real Academia Española, including the elimination of the diacritic accent from solo and demonstrative pronouns.
  • All articles in Portuguese must conform to the Novo Acordo Ortográfico.
  • Use the serial comma in English (“The program emphasizes reading, writing, and speaking.”). Do not use it in Spanish or Portuguese, unless there is confusion in meaning without the comma.
  • Punctuation should go inside the quotation marks in articles in English; all punctuation that does not pertain to the quotation itself should go outside the quotation marks in articles in Spanish and Portuguese. 
  • Do include accents or other diacritical marks on capital letters in Spanish and Portuguese.
  • For linguistic articles, speech samples can include translations, and should be set off with single quotation marks. For example: (1) El café está servido. ‘The coffee is served.’
  • Ellipses: For words omitted by the author, use three periods, each separated by a space, not including final punctuation for sentences. Please do not use brackets. For ellipses in original texts, use three periods, without intervening spaces.
  • Hyphens and Dashes: Please read up on the difference between hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes in English and their usage. In English and Portuguese, when em dashes are used to set a clause apart from the rest of the sentence, do not enter a space between the words and the dash (for example: When the graduate student finally submitted her final essay—nearly two weeks late—her professor sighed in relief). In Spanish, a space goes before the first em dash and after the second em dash (for example: Cuando la estudiante finalmente le entregó su ensayo final —con casi dos semanas de retraso— su profesora suspiró con alivio.)

Names of People

  • Avoid the use of titles with names, such as Professor, Prof., Dr. Dra., Sr., Sra., Mr., Ms., and so on.
  • When referring to an author for the first time within a literature article, please use the complete name (including middle initial, if used). Subsequent references should use the last name only.
  • Use both the paternal and maternal last names when provided in Spanish and Portuguese.
  • For linguistic and pedagogy articles, the modified citation style requires the use of last name only in all cases.

For additional questions regarding the scope, style, or policies of Spanish and Portuguese Review, please contact the SPR Editor at spr@aatsp.org.