Acercamiento al fenómeno de la discriminación laboral en la enseñanza del español como lengua extranjera

Spanish as a foreign language teaching is very successful nowadays and continues to gain ground in many countries and the demand for teachers has increased. However, as there are no regulated undergraduate studies in general, there is a certain informality in the profession. This situation, together with other aspects such as lack of recognition, temporality or seasonality have generated a strong precariousness in the sector with what this entails for teachers. One of the symptoms of this is job discrimination. In order to know the situation of Spanish as a foreign language teachers, a first preliminary and descriptive study has been carried out. For this purpose, an online questionnaire based on previous studies was carried out, although adapted to the specific objectives of this sector. 674 people responded to it. The instrument had 50 open and closed questions. The open-ended questions were analyzed by thematic clusters and processed in the QDAMiner Lite program. The results indicate that a high percentage of teachers have suffered discrimination, especially because of their age. Likewise, the other factors that most cause discriminatory situations are gender and origin. In these categories, cases such as sexual harassment, lack of credibility in professionalism due to the youth of the teacher, or non-hiring due to not having an prestigious accent or speaking a variety of Spanish that is not considered influential are subsumed.