Awareness of language: literacy and second language learning of Spanish in Mexico

ABSTRACT

This report presents findings from a follow-up exploratory study of the development of writing ability in an attempt to identify key component skills and competencies for elementary school literacy learners, grades 2nd, 4th and 6th. The first evaluation consisted in scoring first draft narrative texts for coherence, the second, an assessment of effective self-correction strategies. These two measures were compared to the results of a third test, of metalinguistic awareness related to children’s ability to distinguish between the two languages that they know, and those of a fourth measure of orthographic knowledge. Participants were bilingual elementary school students from an indigenous community in Central Mexico. Results point to important opportunities in future research for the understanding of how metalinguistic awareness is related to literacy learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Metalinguistic awareness
• literacy
• spelling
• second language writing
• Spanish
• bilingual awareness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In Spain, the marigold is a kind of ‘caléndula.’

2 In language contact situations lacking the extensive overlap in the lexicon, which characterizes Mexican Spanish and Nahuatl, any number of alternative methods for selecting test items for a LAT-type test should work just as well.

3 A plateau effect in K-6 literacy learning is widely reported in the literature (Hattie 2008). In contrast, the 2nd-4th-6th grades tendency in the MA assessment of this study showed an almost linear trend (Despite the temptation, we are abstaining from taking this difference as evidence that our MA assessment was independent of literacy!) (Table 3).