Emerging literacy in Spanish among Hispanic heritage language university students in the USA: a pilot study

Abstract

This pilot study identifies some lexical aspects of the emerging writing skills in Spanish among receptive English/Spanish bilingual students with little or no exposure to formal study of the home language upon entering a Spanish Heritage Language Program at a large public university in the Southwestern United States. The 200+ essays analyzed in the study are the last section of an online placement and credit exam that all incoming students take before enrolling in Spanish courses. The study focuses on lexical richness by analyzing lexical density, profile, and variation. It also measures transfer from English in the form of code-switches, borrowings, calques, and lexical creations. This exploratory study complements previous research and provides valuable information to the profession about the learning needs of this student population.

Keywords:

• emerging literacy
• heritage language
• Spanish
• bilingualism
• bilingual lexicon

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A complete sample essay to illustrate writing performance of SHL at the lower end of the bilingual continuum appears in Appendix 1.

2. ‘Exp.’: expected form or item.

3. All examples were transcribed exactly as they appeared in the essays. The number after the examples indicates the essay to which it belongs. After each example there is a standard Spanish version and the corresponding English translation.

4. This number does not include the 571 transfer words.

5. The relationship between lexical and functional words indicates how much information is developed in a written or spoken discourse; the ratio between lexical and functional words can measure the density or informational weight of a particular text. Halliday (1989, 2002) uses this measure to distinguish levels in the oral–writing continuum: ‘Since written language is characteristically reflective rather than active, in a written text the lexical density tends to be higher, and it increases as the text becomes further away from spontaneous speech’ (2002, 328).

6. Davies’ Dictionary contains the 5000 most frequently used Spanish words, based on a 20-million-word corpus representative of the language as used worldwide. The corpus has a good balance of texts from both Latin America and Spain, including different types of discourse: fictional, non-fictional and real conversations.

7. Although there is some disagreement on the concept of ‘core vocabulary’, Carter identifies ‘coreness’ as the relationship between frequency and distribution: ‘Core words will have to be words of high frequency but also they need to have an evenness of range and coverage of texts in the broadest sense of the term, being distributed over a range of different spoken and written corpora’ (Carter 1998, 46). Davies’ Dictionary and the CREA corpus are useful tools to describe the Spanish core vocabulary because of the ample range of written and oral corpora they cover.

8. CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual) is the online Spanish corpus designed by the Real Academia Española that includes more than 200 million words from written and spoken corpora.

9. The classic TTR measure of lexical variation decreases systematically as the length of the text increases, because writers and speakers start repeating words. The Guiraud's index reformulates the TTR allowing comparison among texts of diverse lengths. The index is calculated by dividing the number of types by the root of total tokens = T/√T. The results indicate that the higher the index, the more lexical variation is present in the text; a perfect index of 10 is possible in texts where no word is repeated (Daller 2010).