Perceptions of Spanish heritage and L2 writing.

Abstract

Four compositions written in Spanish by two Spanish heritage speakers and two second language learners are evaluated and commented on by twenty native Spanish speakers from eleven Spanish-speaking countries. The study addresses what differences they notice in the writing and what aspects they find positive and negative. While grammar was troublesome in all, heritage speaker fluency tended to be perceived as denoting better writing.

Introduction

Heritage language learners generally do not perform as well in literacy skills as they do in oral proficiency due largely to a lack of formal education in the Spanish language. Although a wide range of proficiencies exists among heritage learners, much of their knowledge is normally of a more informal register which allows them to function successfully in their home and, perhaps, community environment. In order for heritage learners to take full advantage of their valuable bilingual abilities among the larger communities of Spanish speakers and in business settings, they need to become knowledgeable in academic registers of Spanish (see Achugar, 2003, for a discussion of academic registers in speech). Their writing, and speech, will be scrutinized and they may be prejudged unjustly to be less intelligent or incapable if they do not conform to a professional register in formal situations.

Background

Lipski (1993:161-164) lists some common problems that occur in heritage speaker writing: 1. instability of nominal and adjectival inflection (mi blusa es blanco[a]), 2. incorrectly conjugated verb forms (yo no sabo [se] bien), 3. incorrect use of definite and indefinite articles (yo iba a[la] escuela), 4. errors of prepositional usage, and 5. categorical use of redundant subject pronouns. These errors are common in L2 learners' compositions as well. In addition, heritage speakers make many characteristic spelling errors which stem from interference from oral Spanish and little exposure to the written form. Colombi (1997: 179) lists some of these common spelling mistakes as: the letter "h" (habrir abrir, e estado he estado), and confusion between the letters "c" and "q" (esquela escuela). Colombi (1997) gives more examples of oral influence and English interference in writing at the lexical, semantic, syntactical and discourse levels as well. Kroll (1990:2) states that

   It should not be presumed that the act of writing in one's first
   language is the same as the act of writing in one's second
   language. For example, first and second language learners may not
   approach a writing task in the same way nor attend to feedback in
   the same way.

Schwartz (2003:236) cautions that "our heritage students are not second language learners". The matter is even further complicated when considering second dialect acquisition versus second language acquisition. Valdes (1997:23) iterates the fact that "... acquisition of a standard dialect [is not] analogous to the process of acquiring a second language." She claims that

   ... individuals learning a second language are always aware,
   when presented with a given utterance, of whether or not the
   utterance is part of their first language.... However, this
   is not the case when native or bilingual learners are confronted
   with a standard or prestige variety of the language that they
   speak.

While these statements may be controversial to some, many learners do not realize what they are doing as they write in their native language. By pointing out successful strategies in their native tongue, we can help them apply these same strategies to L2 writing and perhaps to second dialect writing.

Little is know about how second dialect speakers acquire standard dialects. From a cognitive science standpoint, the language of second dialect speakers has become an automatic process which, once learned, occurs rapidly and is quite difficult to suppress or alter (McLaughlin 1987:134). It may well be easier to learn something new rather than adjust the old. Preserving the home dialect while adding on an additional, more professional or academic register may be most beneficial to these students since asking them to suppress what they know is difficult and devalues their variety of Spanish. In the classroom, not only do we have to deal with many negative attitudes toward U.S. Spanish varieties by speakers from other countries but we have to discern a delicate balance between valuing what they do speak while making them aware of the value of adding an academic register to their repertoire. This, of course, does not come into play with L2 learners.

The Current Study

The purpose of the current descriptive study is to investigate the attitudes of well-educated native Spanish speakers toward the Spanish writing of heritage and second-language learners in an effort to provide constructive criticism based on these attitudes to future generations of both L2 and heritage learners. The study aimed to address what differences native speakers notice in L2 and heritage learner writing, how they rate the writing, what aspects of the writing they find positive and negative, and what, if anything, they correct or comment on. I hypothesized that the native speakers would rate the second language learners' writing higher than the below average heritage learner based on the frequency of spelling and mechanical errors she had despite more complex grammatical structures. In making this hypothesis I was assuming that the spelling problems would outweigh other factors such as subjunctive usage.

Participants

The participants serving as evaluators in the study are ten female and ten male medical doctors from eleven different Spanish speaking countries including Argentina (n=2), Colombia (n=4), Costa Rica (n=1), Ecuador (n=2), El Salvador (n=1), Guatemala (n=1), Nicaragua (n=1), Paraguay (n=2), Peru (n=1), Spain (n=3), and Venezuela (n=2). All of the participants are living in the Miami area and are attending courses to prepare them to take an exam to receive their medical certification in the U.S. Their range of time in the U.S. is from one month to sixteen years. Eighteen of the participants have lived in the U.S. under three years. I asked for volunteers in these courses because I wanted to ensure the evaluators were highly educated and were very familiar with an academic register of Spanish.

The compositions being evaluated were written by two female heritage learners and two female L2 learners who were all enrolled in different fourth year advanced Spanish grammar and composition classes. Both L2 learners were Spanish majors, 20 years old from northern Georgia who had studied Spanish in high school but had never spoken Spanish at home or had extended exposure to the language outside of the classroom. The two heritage learners were 19 and 20; one from West Los Angeles (of Mexican heritage) and one from East Chicago, Indiana (of Puerto Rican heritage). Their majors, respectively were undecided and accounting and both minored in Spanish. They had never studied Spanish before coming to the university. They both spoke only Spanish at home while growing up and consider themselves native Spanish speakers.

Methodology

Background information on each native Spanish speaker was collected through a questionnaire written in Spanish. Next, they were instructed to read the four compositions and were told what the topic was. They were only told that the compositions were written by university students in the US. They were informed they could make notes or marks on the compositions if they wanted. After reading they filled out an information sheet in which they commented on and rated the compositions. There was no time limit to complete the experiment.

The heritage speakers were prompted to write a composition on what it is like to be Hispanic in the U.S. They were told to assume that their audience did not know much about Hispanics and they could use personal experiences or experiences from other people. The L2 learners were told to imagine they were Hispanic and write about the same topic. Ten heritage participants visited my office on three occasions to write drafts and do revisions of their compositions. The compositions of the L2 participants were chosen by the researcher from a class of 27 where the instructor allowed class time for two revisions and time at home to work on the compositions. All were allowed to use a bilingual dictionary and were not given a time limit.

From all the samples, a Puerto Rican colleague and the researcher holistically chose what we considered to be one average to above average and one below average writing sample from both the heritage group and the L2 group of students. Both average to above average compositions were fairly organized, addressed the issue adequately, and had fewer grammatical, orthographical, and mechanical errors than others at their same level. The below average compositions were full of these errors, while organization was adequate. The below average heritage learner composition was highly influenced by the learner's oral skills. Both heritage learners used more complex grammatical structures than their L2 peers. Composition A is the above average sample of heritage writing while composition D is the below average sample. B is the below average L2 learner sample and C is the above average sample.

Results

Participants were asked to rate each composition on a likert scale of 1 to 6 with 1 being "unacceptable", 3-4 being "average" and 6 being "excellent". Two participants rated all the compositions equally on the low end of the scale (a female Spaniard rated them all 1 and a female Peruvian rated them all 2). Thus, only eighteen participants were used in the researcher's observations on ranking.

First the researcher investigated the order in which the compositions were ranked regardless of their rating on the likert scale. Sixteen of eighteen participants ranked composition A (above average heritage speaker) as the best composition. The two remaining ranked it as the second best while listing composition C (above average L2 learner) as the best composition. Nine participants ranked C as second place with six ranking D (below average heritage speaker) as second place. One participant from El Salvador ranked D as first place. The numbers for compositions C and D (above average L2 versus below average heritage) were very similar. As for the worst ranked composition, B (the below average L2 learner) received thirteen votes, with C (above average L2 learner) getting two votes and D (below average heritage) earning three votes. Thus, the results summed up are:

A (above average heritage) ranked the best sixteen times.

B (below average L2) ranked the worst thirteen times.

C (above average L2) and D (below average heritage) had very similar results with the majority votes in the middle two rankings.

Next, the participants were asked if it were possible for each composition to have been written by a native Spanish speaker. Eighteen of twenty participants said that A (above average heritage speaker) could have been written by a native speaker whereas only nine of twenty said that D (below average heritage speaker) could have been written by a native. Three stated that B (below average L2) could be a native, and six said that C (above average L2) could be a native. Thus the higher numbers were given to the heritage speakers although all compositions did receive at least three votes for being written by a native.

Finally I looked at the compositions themselves to see what, if any, comments or marks the participants had made on them. Two participants, both males, did not make any marks. Three participants marked some but not all of the compositions. All participants who made corrections marked spelling and mechanical errors such as punctuation and accent mark placement. They also all marked problems with verb conjugations, subject verb agreement, noun adjective agreement, and number and gender agreement. Thus, the vast majority marked mechanical and grammatical errors. In debriefing the researcher found that all participants' writing had been evaluated this way in their home countries. Three participants wrote comments on their papers. One male from Paraguay wrote on composition D "Country folk in my country talk like this" beside the expression "viavisto" for "habia visto" (I had seen.) One female Spaniard, not the one who rated them all as unacceptable, wrote "Mixture of English and Spanish", "Spanglish with all the rules", and finally "It's terrible" on the below average L2 paper. Another female from Venezuela made the most valuable comments and marks of all. Some of her comments include "She jumps from one theme and presents another without making conclusions or finishing the thought" (about B). For composition C she states, "Above average formatting. Intro, development, conclusion." She is the only participant that made comments about organization directly on the compositions.

The participants were also asked what they liked most and least about the compositions. They most liked hearing about the experiences the participants wrote about, and seven participants commented on the efforts they were making in trying to write Spanish. They least liked the over abundance of grammar and spelling mistakes, the use of English constructions and influences and the lack of organization. The latter is interesting since the researcher and her colleague considered the organization of each composition as acceptable. Finally the researcher asked if it was permissible to write as one speaks and if "yes" in what circumstances. Eleven said yes, it was acceptable in personal communications such as emails and letters. One of the eleven said it was acceptable in any situation because communication, however poorly, is a basic human right. Nine said "no, it's not ok to write as one speaks".

Conclusions

Most of the participants saw this as an informal writing assignment based on the personal nature of the topic. For this reason they were less harsh in their comments than they would have been if the students had been writing in a more formal register.

However, they were still firm in their corrections. Only two of the twenty participants ranked A (above average heritage learner) as "excellent" on the scale of 1-6. Fifteen had her in the 4-5 "average" range and the one Spaniard rated her 1 "unacceptable".

The participants were able to determine the above average heritage writer as a native and the below average L2 writer as a non-native a high percentage of the time. The difference between the above average L2 and the below average heritage writer was less apparent. In debriefing, the participants told the researcher that the language of the two heritage writers flowed more smoothly than the other two. Thus, their more native discourse structure revealed their extensive experience with the language along with orality appearing in their writing. Since these students are used to only speaking at home or with friends or writing emails/letters in Spanish, they are not accustomed to making distinctions in formal versus non-formal writing. None of the four writers took advantage of the planning-composing-revising opportunities that they had. They only corrected at the surface level and did not correct for content, a finding similar to Schwartz's (2003) study on heritage speakers' writing strategies. Schwartz (2003) stresses that this process "... should be presented as a recursive process of constructing meaning and working out ideas rather than as an opportunity for spelling practice" (251). As for the L2 learners, we can stress the same and include more phrases for cohesiveness to connect their discourse.

More investigation needs to occur on heritage speaker writing and the effects that their own attitudes and teacher attitudes have on their writing. Showing teachers the kinds of comments and corrections that native speakers from other countries who are not educators have may help them to relay to their students the necessity of acquiring an academic register to be competitive with speakers of other Spanish varieties. It is essential to use students' oral skills to assist them in transferring them to an academic written standard.

References

Achugar, Mariana. 2003. Academic registers in the U.S.: A study of oral texts produced by bilingual speakers in a university graduate program. In: Ana Roca and M. Cecilia Colombi (Eds.), Mi Lengua: Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

Colombi, M. Cecilia. 1997. Perfil del discurso escrito en textos de hispanohablantes: teoria y practica. In: M. Cecilia Colombi and Francisco X. Alarcon (Eds.), La ensenanza del espanol a hispanohablantes: praxis y teoria. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Kroll, Barbara. 1990. Introduction. In: Barbara Kroll (Ed.), Second language writing: Research insights for the classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lipski, John M. 1993. Creoloid phenomena in the Spanish of transitional bilinguals. In: Ana Roca and John M. Lipski (Eds.), Spanish in the United States: Linguistic contact and diversity. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

McLaughlin, Barry. 1987. Theories of second-language learning. London: Edward Arnold.

Schwartz, Ana Maria. 2003. !No me suena!: Heritage Spanish speakers' writing strategies. In: Ana Roca and M. Cecilia Colombi (Eds.), Mi Lengua: Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

Valdes, Guadalupe. 1997. The teaching of Spanish to bilingual Spanish-speaking students: Outstanding issues and unanswered questions. In: M. Cecilia Colombi and Francisco X. Alarcon (Eds.), La ensenanza del espanol a hispanohablantes: praxis y teoria. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Kristi Hislope, North Georgia College and State University

Hislope, Ph.D., is assistant professor of Spanish. She teaches Spanish language and linguistics and ESOL endorsement courses.