Texts Written in Spanish as a Second Language by Deaf Bilingual Students: A Systemic-Functional Linguistics Analysis

Abstract

Spanish language writing by Hearing-impaired students has often been judged on the same scale as peer monolingual hearing students’ productions, overlooking the fact that it involves a bicultural bilingual writing process. This article provides a description of written Spanish as a second language by four bilingual hearing-impaired students, who are themselves Colombian sign language users in their last year of high school in the city of Cali, Colombia. The descriptive study involved interviews with the students and a collection of their written texts. This input allowed us to analyse both the students’ sociolinguistic background and the roles performed by different words. In order to do that, we turned to Halliday’s systemic-functional linguistics classification of words in groups, phrases and categories. Findings showed late acquisition of both languages and writing in non-standard Spanish, with highly frequent occurrence of varied noun phrases, verbal groups and prepositional phrases; and with low frequency use of adverb groups, conjunction groups, and prepositional groups. It was noted that some linguistic variations might be related to an interlanguage and to a transference from Colombian sign language, which is similar to what happens with hearing bilingual learners, with the difference that the Deaf community is a minority in language use, with different modalities and social status. Finally, findings included a reported absence of experts in bicultural bilingual education.