This presentation reports on the first year of working to develop a style of bilingual language learner literature for APU students of English and Japanese languages. APU students were hired as Community Literacy Activists (CLAs). Roles played by the CLAs include story authorship, translation, and outreach/project coordination among others. At the end of the first year, two stories have been reinterpreted from drama scripts to short stories, and translated into Japanese language. While authors worked on first drafts, the team translated and created a bilingual role-based discussion system based on the story “Mr Harris and the Night Train” (Bassett, 2007). The student authors’ first drafts of the grand show "short" stories came out much longer than the prototype, posing challenges to the authors: calibrating their language for learners and shortening their stories by half. The presentation will elucidate some of the tools and processes that have led to the current English versions at about 4,000 words/ Japanese 8,500 characters. Mixed methods were used to capture role, process, and text specifications for developing these bilingual stories. Discussion will include the problem of situating such texts in bilingual classes in the CLE.