Resumen

Introduction
For some years now, advanced students taking English IV as part of their Teacher- and Translator-Training programmes at Facultad de Lenguas (UNCo) have been exposed to short-short stories in English. The present paper characterises microfiction and refers to the linguistic, socio-cultural and affective challenges that it poses to EFL learners. We later turn to issues related to tolerance of ambiguity and its relationship to learning a foreign language. On the basis of an experience carried out in 2010, we describe a new study exploring English IV 2012 learners’ reactions to a set of short-short stories through diary entries. Learners’ contributions to their journals are analysed in search of evidence related to a number of categories of analysis. It is in terms of these criteria that the data are later presented and linked to the development of tolerance of ambiguity and tolerance of others in our context. The results reveal that, even if it was beneficial for the course as a whole, there was a lot of individual variation across participants in the study. Further avenues of research are put forward to investigate learners’ long-term development of tolerance of ambiguity and its correlation to learning efficiency.