• There are still substitutions between connecting verbs and between verbs from the same semantic field, but to a lesser degree.

• No increase in the use of basic propositions. In adverbs, there is: the introduction of any, little, there, inside, outside, now, sometimes…

• Predominant use of economising strategies, but resorting to asking directly for help decreases by half.

• Few explanatory devices in problem lexical areas, but they are a little more precise.

• Noun phrases are more complex and varied. Increase in use of indefinite determiners, able to put two determiners together. Half the students use adjectives and prepositions.

• The majority still make gender mistakes, and half make number agreement errors.

• The construction of more complex verbal syntagmas leads to an increase in the number of mistakes, even to the extent of omitting the main verb.

• Malformation of verbs decreases and are limited to irregular verbs in the simple forms of the indicative. There is an increase in self-correction. The majority now use the perfect and future tenses. The indefinite is more frequently used than the imperfect.

• Half the students use the conditional and the present and imperfect subjunctives.

• Confusions of mood are more frequent, as are confusions between different tenses, particularly in using the present instead of the past or future.

• All the students use unstressed pronouns but with a lot of errors of omission, confusion and addition.

• The majority can now construct temporal subordinates, conditionals of possibility and relative subordinates.

• Speech output has improved: longer and more complex statements are produced.

• A lot of help is still needed: to complete a UIR more than one turn of phrase is still necessary. The conversational rhythm is still very slow and awkward.

• Autonomy of speech increases and students can link together more information but in these cases output is difficult to understand and a lot of help is needed to clarify the meaning. There are quite a lot of grammatical errors that affect the speech coherency.

• Resorting to Spanish is still frequent (nearly 15% of statements are in Spanish).

• There is still some difficulty in understanding what the interviewer is saying (in nearly half of the students). Some 25% are still inhibited in expressing themselves.

• Occasionally they are able to incorporate certain qualitative elements: clarifications, details…

• Speech proficiency improves, but only between 20% and 30% manage to achieve an acceptable standard in line with established criteria.

• As far as reading is concerned, there are still three students who are unable to read a text. In view of the difficulties, the interviewer decided to read the expository text to 10 of the 16 students. Only 25% managed to achieve the criteria of proficiency in reading aloud. Half the students make no intonation whatsoever and the majority make more than five mistakes in deciphering the text.

• Comprehension of texts is minimal. Three students show acceptable understanding of the fable and the expository text. Only two managed to understand the news item.

• In writing, text cohesion is improved (six students came out well), but none of them reached a level of acceptability in all criteria.

MUS, for example, explains the lamb festival. He is a native Berber-speaking 15-year-old boy, currently in the second year of ESO, and has been in Catalonia for 29 months. His ability is minimal, because his explanation would not be adequate without the prior knowledge of the interviewer, but he is capable of contributing some details, like the method of killing the lamb, the fact of wearing different clothing…:

INT: Could you explain to us what takes place at the lamb festival? What do you have to do?

MUS: ah!… like this [makes a throat-cutting gesture]

INT: [smiling] like that… you have to cut the throat...