Actitudes de los profesores hacia la introducción del pretérito indefinido en el nivel de paso 2 en la escuela sueca

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study is to examine the teachers’ attitudes towards teaching the Spanish verb tense pretérito indefinido which corresponds to the preterite tense in English. In the Swedish Compulsory School teachers generally avoid introducing this verb tense in the second level even though this form is more frequent in oral and written Spanish than the present perfect tense. According to previous studies and teachers’ own experience, after four years of studying Spanish the students barely have any understanding of the preterite tense. Therefore, we wanted to find out the teachers’ attitudes towards introducing this verb tense earlier than is the case in today’s school system. The study was carried out with fifty informants who answered a questionnaire divided into two parts, where the first is related to general questions such as age, native language, and experience of teaching. In the second part of the study, the informants rated their agreement or disagreement to 12 statements on a Likert scale. The results of the analysis indicate that the majority of the informants has a positive attitude towards introducing the preterite tense earlier, although some of the informants prefer to teach the present perfect for different reasons. The study also showed that language background and regional variations have an impact on their attitudes.