Interlanguage development in Haitian secondary students and how L1 teachers assess students in Chile

Immigration has largely increased in Chile in the last 20 years. About 6.6% of the Chilean population is foreign, from which 14.3% is Haitian. Haitians’ age spans between 15 and 29 years old and they have come to Chile escaping from a social crisis. They believe that education and work will help them do better in life. Therefore, rates of Haitian students in the Chilean school system have also increased: there were 3,121 Haitian students enrolled in 2017, 101% more than in the previous year. This is a challenge for the public school, which takes in young people who must face social immersion, schooling, and learning of a second language simultaneously. The linguistic barrier affects both students’ and teachers’ adaptation processes, which has an impact on the students’ academic performance and acquisition of Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL). In order to explore students’ academic performance and interlanguage development, we examined students’ SFL development and teachers’ assessment of Haitian high school students’ written production in Spanish. Teachers were asked to use a specially designed grid to assess the correction, complexity, organization and fluency of students, among other elements. Texts were also approached from an error analysis perspective. Results from grids and error analysis were then compared. The preliminary observations of this study show that teachers give very little feedback to students apart from scores and grades, which does not contribute to the development of the foreign language. Error analysis has yielded that Haitian students are in a dynamic process of the acquisition of Spanish, which could be enhanced if L1 teachers were aware of the process of interlanguage development and gave more significant feedback. These results also point at the need to include SFL teaching in the public-school curriculum to promote academic literacy.