¿Un error grave, pero aceptable? Las actitudes hacia la producción oral de aprendices suecos de ELE.

Abstract

This study examines how teachers and speakers of Spanish react to the spoken Spanish of Swedish learners, with focus on errors produced by the learners. Four different groups of informants were interviewed: Spanish teachers in Sweden, Spanish teachers in Spain, University students in Spain, and Other Spanish natives. An adapted version of the CEFR error typology is used for classification. In the 44 semi-structured interviews conducted in Spain and in Sweden, the informants listened to and discussed the excerpts of two dialogues performed by 6 pairs of Swedish students (level B1). The results suggest that the most important factors in oral speech are fluency, understood as the absence of pauses, and the need to "dare to speak". The three groups of natives classify the learners as beginners, while the Swedish teachers consider them intermediate pupils. All groups of informants address the importance of verbs and a Spanish prosody. The two groups of teachers tend to employ a critical style of listening, with focus on grammatical form. University students also focus on grammatical correction whereas natives outside academia tend to show more interest in the content of the students' speech.