The purpose of the study is to examine how the Spanish students in a 6th grade class of primary school consider contrastive analysis approaches in the acquisition of a third language. This study also makes use of a sociocultural perspective that is in relation with the language acquisition perspective and puts its mark in the study. To support our research, we used the qualitative method, specifically, the semi-structured interview. Five Spanish language students stemming from one school class were interviewed. As a result of the questions presented, we were able to conclude that learning Spanish as a target language has its challenges among the Swedish students. Another aspect that is worth highlighting in the data analysis is the importance of the students’ prior knowledge and its integration into the students’ own consciousness.In order to obtain this objective, it is necessary that the teacher helps the students to discover a connection between the forms and use of the Spanish grammar and that it can be done in an easy and playful way within the group in class and in outdoors environments.

Limited information exists regarding the acquisition of syntax and morphology in young Spanish-English bilingual language learners. A method to measure short-term language learning is through structural priming; an auditory model of the target structure is presented, which influences a subject’s subsequent production. The purpose of this thesis was to develop and pilot priming tasks in both English and Spanish to analyze the language production of typically developing bilingual elementary school students. The morphosyntactic structures targeted in the structural priming task included the third person singular and past tense in English, as well as direct object clitics and imperfect tense in Spanish. The study included three participants, aged 4;7, 6;7, and 10;11. Results revealed that bilingual elementary students with varied language exposure are influenced and learn from morphosyntactic priming. / text