La enseñanza del español en Suecia. Enfoques y métodos empleados por cinco profesores

Sammanfattning: This thesis is an exploratory, descriptive and comparative study of teachers’ focus and teaching methods in Spanish as a third language (L3) in Sweden. The curriculum of Modern Languages emphasizes communicative competence and the purpose of the study is to examine how this is applied in the teaching of the course Spanish 4 and how the students progress during the course. Five teachers at four Senior high schools in three different municipalities in Sweden have been observed. With 30 lesson observations, 15 interviews with the five teachers and the pre- and post-tests in reading and listening comprehension as well as written production, the results performed by the 142 students of the six different groups involved in the study have been analyzed. The complexity of teaching brings many factors into play, both in terms of external conditions such as the syllabus, the number of teaching hours and students, teachers’ qualifications and students’ prior knowledge as well as the situation in the classroom in terms of the choice of methods, materials, and the various relationships between teachers and students. In the observations and interviews the focus is on the following parameters: the spoken language in the classroom, the didactic material, working practices and students' distractions in the classroom. The study demonstrates how different teaching looks depending on teachers, both in their approach and in their choice of material, some rely on classroom work for the whole group and textbook assignments and others are using more “free” projects or thematical work that involve authentic material. Even the use of the target language differs between classrooms in which some teachers use Spanish as their working language whereas others tend to use mainly Swedish. Pupils’ distractions such as cell phones or the use of computers for information irrelevant to the teaching as well as the large number of late arrivals evoked an inevitable fourth parameter based on the observations. The test results vary greatly between the groups and progression over the course both go forward and backward depending on the group. All teachers in the study adopt a communicative focus, but each teacher creates her own method based on her own experiences, visions and outside influences. Studies of Spanish teaching in practice in the Swedish classroom have been rare so far, this study presents a contribution when shedding light on the present situation.