Emergent literacy in Spanish as a language for immigrants

Abstract

The acquisition of literacy skills constitutes a challenging task for many second language (L2)migrant learners. This is probably due to the lower priority given to written expression within thecommunicative approaches of L2 teaching that emphasizes oral interaction over writing practices, aswell as to the fact that many migrants – especially those with a low or incomplete educational levelin their first language – may lack sufficient motivation to acquire or improve their literacy skills in the language of the host country. However, writing is a key element for everyday transactions thatmigrants have to carry out in order to find a job or to be adequately integrated into the receivingsocieties, thus, reaching a minimum literacy level in the target language becomes an obvious needfor this population.Based on the above, the aim of the present study was twofold: first, to determine possiblefeatures and developmental stages of literacy acquisition in the written productions of a group ofmigrant learners of Spanish as a L2 who took the LETRA certification exam; second, to examine theextent to which gender, age, educational level, length of stay in Spain and duration of Spanishlanguage courses contribute to their writing competence. Participants were 43 migrants from Rumania, Cameroon and Nigeria, 18 men and 25 women, aged between 16 and 63 years old. The corpus used for this study derived from the writing sectionof the Diploma LETRA (only Tasks 2 and 3) and was analysed in terms of errors (spelling,grammatical, and lexical errors), number of words, and number and types of spelling strategies usedby the participants.The results showed a clear prevalence of grammatical errors and phonetic and phonemicstrategies. Moreover, we found negative and statistically significant correlations between length ofstay in Spain and number of grammatical errors (Task 2), and number of words (Task 3), while agewas positively correlated with number of errors in Task 3. On the other hand, neither gender noreducational level in the first language appeared to have an influence on the linguistic variables ofthe study, except for the number of words in Task 3, being participants with university studies thosewho wrote relatively longer essays.