Join the first webinar of the 2026-27 9 Months, 9 Universities series: Learning the Spanish verbal system through a serious game

We invite you to join the first session in  the 2026-27 edition of the 9 Months, 9 Universities webinar series, organised within the framework of the Arqus Plurilingual and Intercultural Hub. The webinar, hosted by the University of Granada, will take place on Thursday, 29 October, at 11:00 CET. The session will be broadcast live on YouTube and held in Spanish.

The session, entitled “Learning the Spanish Verbal System Through a Serious Game: Morfemo and the Island of Verbs”, will be presented by Alejandro Castañeda Castro from the University of Granada.

In this webinar, participants will be introduced to an original digital resource developed as part of the IMAGINE project (Ref.: PID2021-128771OB-I00), funded by Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under the initiative “Una forma de hacer Europa”. The resource is a serious game entitled Morfemo and the Island of Verbs, designed for learners of Spanish and freely available as a mobile application.

Following a brief overview of the theoretical foundations underlying the description of the Spanish verbal system, as well as the pre-experimental and quasi-experimental validation processes conducted during the pilot testing of the materials, the webinar will introduce some of the activities included in the game.

Designed to develop learners’ grammatical competence in Spanish, this digital resource combines its own narrative structure with a series of activities focusing on a range of Spanish indicative tenses . Its aim is to bring together a solid framework for describing and working on the verbal system with a flexible, engaging and rigorous learning approach.

About the speaker

Dr Alejandro Castañeda Castro holds a PhD in Hispanic Philology from the University of Granada, where he received an extraordinary doctoral award for the 1993–1995 period. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of General Linguistics and Literary Theory at the University of Granada.

He is co-author of Gramática Básica del Estudiante de Español (Barcelona: Editorial Difusión, 2011), a work that has been translated into several languages and published in international editions by various foreign publishers, including Pearson-Prentice Hall in the United States and Klett in Germany. The book  has also served as a methodological model for the development of grammars of Italian and Portuguese.

Among his other notable publications are:

1. The edited volume Enseñanza de gramática avanzada de ELE. Criterios y recursos, published by SGEL (2014).
2. The article “Ser and estar from the Cognitive Grammar perspective”, published in VIAL (Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics), 15: 9–46 (2018).
3. The edited volume Lingüística cognitiva y español LE/L2, co-edited with Iraide Ibarretxe and Teresa Cadierno and published by Routledge (2019).
4. The chapter “Lingüística cognitiva”, contributed to The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Language Teaching – “Metodología, recursos y contextos para la enseñanza del español L2”, edited by Javier Muñoz-Bassols, Elisa Gironzetti and Manel Lacorte and published by Routledge (2018).
5. The forthcoming volume Tiempos verbales del español. Descripción cognitiva, validación empírica y aplicación didáctica digital para estudiantes de español LE/L2, co-edited and co-authored and published by Editorial Comares (in press).