Rakel Österberg teaches courses on Spanish and Romance languages at undergraduate and graduate level on second language acquisition and learning, Spanish linguistics and linguistics, Spanish grammar, mediation, academic writing and language education. She collaborates with colleagues who teach Spanish, both nationally and internationally. The students study Spanish in different programmes (interpretation and translation, the teacher training programme, Latin American studies). She also supervises degree projects and master dissertations.

Rakel Österberg  works with

 several lines of investigation in three main constellations of researchers:

- Studies of the educational setting of foreign languages with the TAL-project: Dr. Jonas Granfeldt (project leader, LU), Dr. Camilla Bardel (SU), Dr. Gudrun Erickson (GU), Dr. Susan Sayehli (SU) and Dr. Malin Ågren (LU). This project has finished but the team is still working ocn publications.

- Deeper studies of complexity in discourse and syntax in spoken language but in users at higher proficiency levels with the second team:  Dr. Fant and  Dr. Bartning (both SU) on data from the High-Level Proficiency in Second Language Use project (AAA).

- A

cademic writing among university students of Spanish in a research project entitled Spanish as a Heritage Language in Sweden. In this project, Österberg together with the colleagues, Alejandra Donoso (Linneaus University) and Enrique Sologuren (Universidad de los Ande-, Chiles) have studied, among other topics, the written production of students of various linguistic backgrounds: L2 Spanish learners (L1 Swedish), Heritage language speakers of Spanish (bilinguals in Swedish and Spanish since early childhood) and Spanish native speakers. Variables such as language contact, motivation to maintain and to learn Spanish and attendance to mother tongue instruction have been under the scope of this research.

The project Spanish as a Heritage Language in Sweden has led to the organization of two International Workshops at Stockholm University (2014 and 2019). The collaboration has also led to the participation in several international research conferences and symposia. As part of this project, a peer-reviewed chapter was published in the volume Multilingual contributions to writing research: Towards an equal academic Exchange (2021). Another paper, entitled Back to the Initial Condition: Experiences that trigger the need to develop language skills among university Spanish students has recently been published in Humanetten 48 (2022).