Dificultades en el uso de los tiempos del pasado imperfecto/indefinido con verbos estativos y de logro por estudiantes suecos de español como lengua extranjera con nivel A2, B1 y B2

Sammanfattning: This work is the result of an interest in realizing a study about the difficulties that Swedish students encounter when learning Spanish as a foreign language, levels A2, B1 and B2, when choosing between the tenses the imperfect and the preterit in state verbs and achievement verbs. To obtain material for this study, three different tasks were used. In the first one, the students received a story in which they had to fill in the correct forms in the past tense, either the imperfect or the preterit. In the second task the students had to write a page about whatthey did during their latest vacations. The third one consisted of an interview, in which the participants had to speak about the most recent conflict or problem they had had with someone or something. For the analysis of the material the principal method has been an error analysis. With the information that was retrieved from the three different exercises a quantitative study was made, and eventually also a qualitative one. The results from task 1 suggest that level A2 students make more mistakes in the use of these tenses than the otherlevels do. However, data from tasks 2 and 3 does not show significant differences in the use of the imperfect and the preterit in state verbs and achievement verbs. On the other hand, it was found that the students from all three levels have greater difficulties in the controlled exercise than in the free ones. It was also found that in the second and third tasks, the Swedish students of Spanish as a foreign language use the imperfect and the preterit in a similar way asthe group of native speakers who were part of the investigation do. The objective of this study was to determine to what extent and how difficulties in adquisition and/or learning of these two verb tenses occur in state and achievement verbs. The selection of these types of verbs is explained by the almost natural relation that exists in the past tenses studied; the imperfect with state verbs and the preterit with achievement verbs. Finally, it can be stated that the results of this study provide significant information about the use of these verb forms. At thesame time, the purpose of this study is to contribute to future investigations about the selection of the imperfect or the preterit.