Summary: | The present study examines and classifies learning activities found in teaching materials of Spanish as a foreign language produced for a Swedish context with the aim of determining to what extent they conform to the functional, action-oriented language view advocated by the Swedish curriculum. Both the distribution of learning activities within receptive, productive and interactive skills, the activity types within each skill, and the theoretical underpinnings of the activities have been studied in four popular coursebooks and two websites for teaching Spanish as a foreign language. The activities analyzed have shown a dominance of the written language even in oral activities. The results have also shown a bias towards more controlled, non-communicative activities with an explicit focus on forms at the expense of freer communicative activities with a primary focus on meaning, known to support language acquisition.
|