ACTITUDES Y CREENCIAS DE ESTUDIANTES ESLOVACOS, CHECOS Y POLACOS HACIA LAS VARIEDADES CULTAS DEL ESPAÑOL: VALORACIÓN DIRECTA E INDIRECTA.

This paper examines the attitudes and beliefs of students of Spanish as a foreign language, who undertook their secondary education in the bilingual sections of Slovakia, Czech Republic and Poland, towards the educated varieties of Spanish. To achieve our goal, we relied on the PRECAVES-XXI project, which allowed us to establish how the surveyed students valued the varieties in both direct (evaluating an audio recording) and indirect (evaluating the speaker, the region and the culture) ways. It was found that, in the case of direct evaluation, the variety that obtained the best results was the Castilian, followed by the Mexican, the Rioplatense and, finally, the Andalusian variety. Almost identical results were obtained in the indirect evaluation by the region and the culture. However, this was not the case in the evaluation by the speaker, in which the order of the varieties, best to worst, was as follows: Castilian, Andalusian, Rioplatense and Mexican. Finally, the possible causes of such results are discussed, as well as their application in the field of teaching Spanish as a foreign language, and in Hispanic language policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]