Abstract:

At our current global society, teachers must promote a taste for lifelong learning and be able to develop positive attitudes of openness towards linguistic and cultural diversity in the SFL class. According to Díez (2008), teacher shall work with the knowledge, technology and information, which circulates in society and is ephemeral, by mobilising and promoting the students’ plurilingual and intercultural skills through activities, so that they have the opportunity to interact with speakers of the target language.

In fact, Spanish has many nuances, seen from the inside and from the outside. This overwhelming diversity should be the center of teaching, in order to tune in to what the official academic and government speeches say about the status of Spanish language in the 21st century (Morales Meza, 2017). Taking all this into consideration, the SFL teachers have to be well prepared for this new demanding global and international reality, since it is not enough to have knowledge of planning, teaching methodologies, vocabulary, grammar and phonetics. There is no doubt that the SFL teachers shall have knowledge about both the linguistic and cultural varieties of Spanish. In fact, we believe that teachers should have a deep and extensive knowledge of Spanish as a language (Beaven and Garrido, 2000; Blanco, 2000; Bugel, 2001; Flórez Márquez, 2000; Moreno Fernández, 2012).

Moreover, researchers as Moreno Fernández (2000) and Carmen Blanco (2000) highlight the need to involve future teachers in the study of contents related to dialectology and sociolinguistics, so that they have contact with the Spanish language geolectal varieties in their academic training, the criteria for selecting the model or models to be taught, the features that characterise a certain standard, the presence and sequencing of the different varieties in the teaching programs and materials, etc. (Andión Herrero and Gil Burgman, 2013).

Within this context, following a both qualitative and quantitative methodological approach, we have undertaken a study with the following aims:
a) analyse the representations that teachers (future teachers’ trainers or supervisors) of Portuguese higher education institutions (HEI) have of teaching practices which favor the (re)building of knowledge related to Spanish and its varieties;
b) analyse the courses that offer content on Latin America in Portuguese HEI, in relation to teacher training;
c) analyse SFL course books (used in Portuguese HEI) regarding their approach to content related to the linguistic and sociocultural varieties of Latin American Spanish.

The main corpus of our work focuses on the analysis of data collected through the application of questionnaires to teachers and the data collected related to the assessment grids of course books, focusing on the topic of linguistic and cultural varieties of Spanish.

Results show that there are HEI and course books that try to cover pertinent topics for the future work of SFL teachers, but some of them seem to have forgotten topics related to the domain of linguistic variation. Teachers also reveal attitudes and values which show that their preferred varieties are the peninsular ones. Moreover, in some cases it seems that they to do not have the knowledge to undertake a teaching and learning process which focuses on a broader coverage of the linguistic and cultural varieties, apart from the peninsular ones.

Keywords:

Linguistic and cultural varieties, pan-hispanic competence.