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The present study examines the theoretical underpinnings of learning activities found in course books for Spanish as a Foreign Language produced for a Swedish context. The Swedish curriculum adopts a functional, action-oriented approach officially related to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages which, in turn, draws on a communicative task-based framework. Provided that the course books have been guided by the official guidelines, it would be expected that communicative task-based activities are the most commonly found type of learning activity.

The study analyzes the distribution of learning activities within receptive, productive and interactional skills, the activity types within each skill, and the theoretical bases underlying the activities found in four widely used course books for teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language in Sweden. In total, 1672 learning activities are analyzed. The study aims at verifying whether there is a dominance of any of the skills, and to what extent the types of activities within each skill reflect the functional, action-oriented approach adopted in the educational steering documents.

The results indicate a dominance of the written language, even in oral activities. The study’s findings also show a dominance of more controlled, noncommunicative activities with an explicit focus on forms at the expense of the freer communicative activities with a primary focus on meaning, typical of a taskbased framework. Very often, they reflect earlier approaches based on a structural view of language and a behaviorist view of learning, such as the grammartranslation or the audiolingual methods, while activity types with a task-based approach are underrepresented.