The work presented here is part of a research project that studies the classroom practices of teachers in Primary Education. The paper studies the link between teachers' practices in teaching different learning subjects and their pre-planning of those practices; in particular, we present results on the subject of Spanish language and literature for pupils from 6 to 12. Several strategies have been designed with a view to analysing these aspects, some of which are related to the decisions teachers take in their pre-class preparation, while others are linked to an analysis of classroom practices within the real contexts in which they take place. We base ourselves on the notion that the attitudes and approaches to education that the teachers adopt are closely linked, and these, in turn, have a significant impact on how they perform in class. This enables us to link aspects such as the views teachers may have regarding teaching the subject of Spanish language and the approaches they adopt in the design or programming of their practical work and, in turn, how they manage their teaching activities in a real class situation.

Schools involve numerous actions designed to disseminate the different bodies of knowledge through classroom practices involving teachers and pupils (Chevallard, 2007). Curricular knowledge may need to be reorganised and transformed for teaching purposes (Deng, 2020), and such a recontextualisation is one of the crucial aspects of teachers’ professional duties (Gericke et al., 2018). Part of the work in the classroom involves transforming academic content into understandable and recognisable structures, as well as selecting and building those knowledge units to ensure they can be worked on in significant experiences from an educational perspective. Ultimately, teaching in direct practices involves adapting or changing knowledge according to the interactive processes undertaken in situ and to specific interactions with pupils. There are therefore empirical results that reflect different didactic approaches to the different subjects (Stengel, 1997; Graeber, Newton, & Chambliss, 2012) and experts that make teachers responsible for the bulk of the decisions to be made in classroom practices in terms of subjects and content (Klafki 2000, Shulmann 1987).  

Along these lines, and based on teachers’ planning, this paper will discuss the nature of the decisions teachers make when they plan the real circumstances of their practices and how these practices are developed within the classroom when Spanish language and literature is taught. Our research has been conducted on a sample of Primary Education teachers by focusing on the planning that is nearest in time to the action, in other words, to the planning of each classroom session, with a view to gathering information that is as close as possible to the lesson itself. As Yinger (1980) and Tillema (2003) stress, the closer in time the planning is to the actual action, the greater the similarities they will both share. In other words, long-term planning (annual, quarterly) shares fewer features with the direct action than short-term planning (weekly, daily, or on a lesson or teaching unit).

Therefore, by studying the teachers’ views in relation to the teaching and planning of the subject of Spanish language and literature, we aim to develop the following objectives:

1.- Describe the views on curricular planning for the subject of Spanish language and literature expressed by the teachers involved in the project.

2.- Analyse these views and their relationship with the real classroom practices of those same teachers when they teach Spanish language and literature

This research has adopted an intensive study model of classroom practices that has permitted a systematic analysis to be made of the teaching activities of our cohort of teachers (three teachers in total from three different schools). According to the nature of the subject of study, several different techniques have been designed for data collection and gathering: A) Regarding objective 1, we use a semi-structured interview with questions exploring the teacher’s views on teaching Spanish language and literature and the planning of the learning process to be applied on an immediate base in their classes. Audio recordings were made of these interviews, which were held only moments before the teachers went into class. B) Regarding objective 2, the following procedure was applied: a video and audio recording were made of three full sessions of classroom work (five hours per session, 9 classroom sessions, 45 hours in total) for each one of the cases. The interviews were classified by analysing the content of the teachers’ answers (Loughran, Mulhall & Berry 2004; Donnelly, McGarr & O’Reilly, 2011) The recordings of the sessions were transcribed with a view to analysing the practices by identifying specific teaching tasks in order to subsequently classify each one of the tasks into a system of categories (Ramírez et al., 2019). The first step for obtaining a general snapshot of what happens in the classroom, detecting the groupings and the time spent teaching Spanish language and literature, involves breaking the classroom session down into Typical Classroom Activities (TCAs); each one of these TCAs in the teaching of Spanish Language and Literature is, in turn, broken down into tasks that are finally analysed through our system of categories. Our system of analysis is structured around five main categories (Rodríguez & Martín-Sánchez, 2020; Rodríguez, Ramírez, Martín-Domínguez, Martín-Sánchez, 2019): 1) oral language; 2) written language; 3) other modes of communication; 4) linguistic competence and language rules; 5) Literary education. These dimensions are, in turn, subdivided into a detailed set of categories and subcategories for analysing the complexity of practices that teachers may undertake in this educational process.

Although the work is still ongoing, certain trends are emerging: - According with previous work, the data point to activities as the link between teacher-reported and observed practices. However, an effect linked to the grade at which teachers teach is observed, so that in higher grades the linkage introduces the content alongside the activities, which is not so evident in the initial grades. - When asked about the aims of the educational process, teachers allude to broad goals understood as broad aims within the stage of language teaching: “Reading comprehension” “to write correctly”, “I believe that both reading comprehension and oral expression are important”. These goals do not appear in teachers' explanations of their own practice and it is not easy to observe these broad aims in their practice. - However, when teachers talk about what they plan to do immediately or have just done in the classroom, there is a much greater level of congruence with their own practices. - Both in the practices declared and in those observed, we find a notable predominance of tasks related to Written Language and an anecdotal presence of tasks related to Literary Education. We observe a clear downward evolution in the presence of tasks linked to Other modes of communication, much more present the younger the pupils are; and an evident evolutionary increase in the dimension Language competence and norms, more prominent the higher the grade. The Oral Language dimension seems to be relevant throughout the whole stage. - In all courses, the teachers are concerned with the work on the spelling rules, arbitrary spelling and writing conventions, the learning of vocabulary, the comprehension of sentences and the development of the ability to read and write or giving children autonomy in the use of meaning-finding tools such as the dictionary.

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