SocioCultural Context of Writing
SYMPOSIUM TITLE: ANALYSING ACADEMIC WRITING PRACTICES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TARTU: A MULTIFACETED PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE, TEACHING, AND TRADITION TITLE: TRACING CROSSLINGUISTIC INFLUENCES: THE CORPUS OF FINAL PROJECTS IN SPANISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
Mari Kruse
University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
My current investigation on the final papers of the Department of Spanish Language and Literature (University of Tartu) studies the traceable lexicogrammatical influences of other languages on written academic Spanish. It aims to find traces of their authors’ mother tongue, Estonian, and English, the dominating lingua franca , in the deviations from the standard uses of Spanish. A key term is the perceived distance (Ringbom 1986) between languages: learners use any obvious formal similarities between the learned language (Spanish) and others in their repertoire depending on whether they consider these languages closely related or not; therefore transferring from English is supposedly more likely than from Estonian. Ringbom also suggested that while formal lexical similarities can be transferred from any learned language, grammar, syntax and semantics are only transferred from the first language. To test this, about 10% of the 900 000 word corpus was observed manually to establish search parameters (deviations in lexis, grammar, and to a lesser degree, word order), after which the whole corpus was analysed with AntConc. A parallel corpus of Spanish doctoral thesis was also formed to compliment general dictionaries. Initial findings indicate English influences on all levels analysed. My aim is to elaborate a guide and a three language glossary for Estonian Spanish students to improve their academic writing, while it will also be possible to compare academic surroundings with a different linguistic background, investigating whether English influence rather depends on linguistic relatedness, proficiency in the languages involved or the way academic writing is taught.
References
Ringbom, H., 1986. Crosslinguistic influence and the foreign language learning process. In: E. Kellerman & M. Sharwood Smith, eds.1986. Crosslinguistic Influence in Second Language Acquisition . New York, etc.: Pergamon Press. pp. 150162.