Abstract
AbstractThis paper draws some general conclusions from the evidence gathered by two recent analyses, which traced the development of advanced literacy by two undergraduate language learner populations: (1) Humanities students of the National Autonomous University of Mexico for whom Spanish is a native language (L1); and (2) Linguistics students enrolled at the University of California, Davis for whom Spanish is either a heritage (HL) or a second language (L2). Textual scrutiny of student texts extracted from the Corpus del Lenguaje Académico en Español (or CLAE: <www.lenguajeacademico.info>) documents positive trends in the acquisition of ideational grammatical metaphors both in the monolingual, Spanish-only university setting of Mexico, and in the Spanish-English bilingual context of California. In this analysis, I propose that, regardless of the participants’ native language(s), learners of Spanish undergo parallel developmental stages within Halliday’s model of language acquisition at the advanced level.
Highlights
This study reports on the findings of two recent analyses, which traced the development of advanced literacy by two undergraduate language learner populations: (1) Humanities students of the National Autonomous University of Mexico for whom Spanish is a native language (L1) (Rodríguez 2014); and (2) Linguistics students enrolled at the University of California, Davis for whom Spanish is either a heritage (HL) or a second language (L2) (Velázquez-Mendoza 2014)
This would allow for the identification of how abstract and compact the question-and-answer genre produced in a bilingual (Spanish-English) context is compared to the homologous genre produced in the monolingual—that is, Spanish-only—setting of Mexico. (Ignatieva (2008): 186) has shown that essays produced in Mexico exhibit a higher incidence of ideational grammatical metaphors, namely, 6.66 %, than Mexican questionand-answer texts
(b) The phase of linguistic complementarity, or the sensibility that advanced language learners must develop in order to customize their register according to the formality or informality—or a mid point thereof—of a communicative act
Summary
This study reports on the findings of two recent analyses, which traced the development of advanced literacy by two undergraduate language learner populations: (1) Humanities students of the National Autonomous University of Mexico for whom Spanish is a native language (L1) (Rodríguez 2014); and (2) Linguistics students enrolled at the University of California, Davis for whom Spanish is either a heritage (HL) or a second language (L2) (Velázquez-Mendoza 2014). Because the existence of (at least) two levels of meaning is presupposed in these types of expressions As stated earlier, both in English and in Spanish the natural way to codify processes like attack and remove, as in (1), is through verbs. As exemplified in (3), in grammatical metaphors the natural grammatical categories of the lexicon change when abstract, incongruent constructions are derived from their congruent counterparts Expressions such as the attack and the removal are not metaphors in the literary sense, given the (albeit subtle) change in meaning, but rather grammatical metaphors because of the actual switch in grammatical categories in the passage between the underlying language form, that of (3b), and the form corresponding to the surface level, that of (3a). I sought to investigate how similar or dissimilar linguistic development of students in the bilingual, US university context was in contrast to that of a monolingual Mexican student population in a comparable educational setting
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