This paper focuses on HL speakers’ academic writing and will discuss measures of literacy as a function of cross-linguistic influence and educational background. The need to write academic texts in Spanish is growing as a part of higher education (e.g. Teacher education). The results highlight the need of measures which reflect the genre.
This paper focuses on heritage language (HL) speakers' academic writing in Spanish and will discuss measures of literacy as a function of cross-linguistic influence and educational background. Lately, the need to write academic texts in Spanish has grown as a part of higher education (e.eg. Teacher education). The number of HL speakers in Sweden is considerable (King and Ganuza 2005). HL speakers are those individuals who have been exposed to an L1 in the immediate environment since early childhood while having been exposed simultaneously to the majority language in the context where they live (Montrul 2012). HL speakers' skills vary (Flores, Kupisch & Rinke 2018), since factors such as the level of education in the HL (Bylund and Díaz 2012) and the amount of contact with the HL, seem to have an impact on their linguistic repertoire. HL speakers seldom develop advanced-level written proficiency in their HL; instead, they tend to use colloquial language (Valdés 2014). The aim of this study is to find out whether HL speakers adopt Spanish writing conventions when writing in Spanish or if they rely on the writing conventions of their dominant language, in this case Swedish. Relevant writing conventions to the genre are analyzed in Swedish and Spanish Research papers (n=10). The participants are university students: Spanish HL speakers, n=25; Spanish L2 speakers (Swedish L1), n=25 and Spanish natives, n=25, in their third term of Spanish as a FL. A non-experimental study was carried out in which the following aspects were measured: rhetorical organization (Swales 2004; 2014), syntactic complexity and text-binding. The results show that HL speakers’ texts share features that are typical of spoken Spanish. Text-binding functions are expressed by paratactic structure and paraphrasing. The results highlight the need of combined qualitative and quantitative measures which reflect the genre.
