En esta tesina se investiga, con la base de las teorías del aprendizaje de idiomas, si cinco profesores de español han identificado diferentes estrategias para aprender vocabulario entre sus estudiantes. También si los profesores tienen en cuenta esas diferencias en su enseñanza del vocabulario. Se realizó un estudio cualitativo con la ayuda de entrevistas en profundidad con cinco profesores de español de la escuela secundaria. Este estudio demuestra que los estudiantes aprenden palabras principalmente a través de la repetición, y la mayoría de los ejercicios que se realizan son ejercicios de repetición. Los profesores creen que existen buenas herramientas, especialmente digitales, que hacen que los ejercicios de repetición sean más interactivos. Pero lo que los profesores encuentran más influyente en el aprendizaje del vocabulario es qué motivación o ambición tiene el estudiante para aprender el idioma. La mayor motivación para la mayoría de los estudiantes, según los profesores en este estudio, es a qué nivel realmente quieren aprender. Esto significa que los profesores tienen que luchar para que los estudiantes quieran poder usar las palabras y no solo memorizarlas para las pruebas. Por lo tanto, los profesores se concentran más en encontrar y variar los ejercicios que pueden aumentar la motivación para aprender palabras, en lugar de qué estrategia podrían ser más efectiva.

The study is based on the answers of 106 international students of Spanish as a foreign language from three different private schools in Madrid. The purpose of this paper is to study, firstly, whether or how the intrinsic motivation of adult Spanish learners, their choice of strategies and the time they spend on vocabulary learning outside of the school, are influenced by the their age, gender or mother tongue. Secondly, the aim of this study is to identify whether learners with a higher degree of intrinsic motivation use more of their free time on vocabulary learning and whether they use a greater variety of vocabulary learning strategies than learners with a lesser degree of intrinsic motivation. Apart from the learning intensity and strategic variety, there is the aim of finding particular strategies preferred by the two different motivation groups. The hypothesis regarding the first part of the study is that, while gender and mother tongue probably won't influence the students' intrinsic motivation or the time they spend on vocabulary learning outside of the classroom, age, and in that sense, responsibility, will. Also, learners from different parts of the world are likely to apply different strategies in order to learn and remember the vocabulary so the mother tongue is important regarding their choice of strategies. The hypothesis regarding the second part of this study is that learners with a high degree of intrinsic motivation will use more of their time on vocabulary learning, they will apply a greater variety of vocabulary learning strategies and are more likely to use mnemotechnics and look for conversation possibilities than learners with a lesser degree of intrinsic motivation. The evidence from this empirical study partly supports the hypothesis. Gender had influence on the participants' intrinsic motivation. The evidence suggests that female learners have a higher degree of intrinsic motivation than the male learners. Correlations were found between the metacognitive and cognitive learning strategies of the Romanic and Germanic language group suggesting that learners with a Romanic mother tongue tend to use more metacognitive strategies than any other language group of the research. As for the Germanic mother tongue, the evidence suggest that learners belonging to this group tend to use more cognitive strategies than learners with a Romanic mother tongue. Also, the research results suggest that learners with a higher degree of intrinsic motivation use more time on vocabulary learning. Furthermore, the results indicate that learners with a higher degree of the intrinsic motivation tend to use more memory strategies than those learners with a lower degree of intrinsic motivation.