Written English of Mexican American Students: a Study of Grammar, Structure and Organization.

Abstract

The production by freshmen Spanish-English bilinguals in a Texas college of written English was analyzed extensively. Assessments of rhetorical and linguistic units, of conventions of st and ard English, and of eleven measures/"degrees" of structural errors were compared in terms of two models/types of bilinguality. Language discrepancies discovered included verb tense and agreement, adjective degrees, possessive markers, prepositions, homonym confusion, and paragraph and essay organization and development. Although analyses by clause length, T-unit length, and nominalizations indicated that the subjects possessed adequate or "capable" syntactic and conceptual maturity, qualitative analyses suggested that the subjects were generating a variation of st and ard written English. It was suggested that (1) daily processing of two languages in a bilingual community and (2) certain demographic and sociolinguistic factors could account for the classified deviations. Not surprisingly, the quantitative-qualitative analyses reveal that Type I bilinguals--i.e., those educated in the United States--perform better, in general, than Type II bilinguals--i.e., those educated partly in Mexico. Implications for instruction highlight the psycholinguistic process involved while learning two languages simultaneously, and the recognition of certain sociolinguistic factors present in the community.