Elizabeth's Writing Analysis

Using Rubin and Carlan's stages of writing development to assess Elizabeth, I can confidently say that in both Spanish and English, Elizabeth is at the conventional stage. At this stage, students’ writing is generally correct and their vocabulary and sentences structure is more complex. As an 11^th grader, she is fully literate in the English language and has fully developed her abilities as an English writer. Since 7^th grade, she has transferred these abilities to Spanish. As a sequential bilingual, Elizabeth relied on her solid base in her native language to develop literacy in Spanish later in life.

In both languages, Elizabeth can convey a message and understands that the purpose of writing is to communicate information to others. Her language structures are much more complex in English than in Spanish due to the training she has received through the years. Her education has been primarily in the English language reinforcing the usage of English language conventions. For instance in her English sample she wrote “Upon marriage they settled upon a farm that my Grandpa had owned, and looked to start a family and the rest of their lives together, giving birth to my brother Nate just 4 years later.” In Spanish, just like in English, she takes risks with more complex grammatical and syntactical sentences requiring, for instance, the correct use of the preterit and imperfect as exemplified by the following sentence: “Europa tenía muchos caracteristicas y ventajes naturales que ponían Europa con una avance encima de los Americas, y porque de eso, Europa conquistó y se desarrolló mas rapido de las Americas.” In terms of Elizabeth’s discourse, not differently from other native English students, I will argue that her organizational patterns tend to follow the linear, deductive, enumerative composition. This type of organizational pattern is predominant in her English sample and it permeates her Spanish writing as well. Interestingly enough, I may also argue that her writing in English might have been influenced by her Spanish. In her English sample, she sometimes writes long sentences and, on occasion, she uses poetic language and flexible sentence structures which are used more prominently in Spanish as in the following example “The wedding was set for a snowy October day, 35 years ago, with the bride dressed in white and the groomsmen clad in brown and peach tuxes.” However, for the most part, her English writing follows the linear organizational pattern to highlight logical relationship between ideas.

Elizabeth writing sample gives me an idea of how confident and proficient she is in her native language. Following the WIDA rubric for writing, I can say that Elizabeth uses a variety of sentence lengths of varying linguistic complexity and precise vocabulary. Moreover, her ideas are well-organized through tight cohesion and organization. In Spanish, I believe that Elizabeth’s writing is at level 3, at a developing stage similar to her speaking level. She uses simple and expanded sentences that show emerging complexity to provide details such as “Con mucho comida, los personas de Europa podían tener excelente comida, y desarrollaban permanente lugares para viviendo.” Regarding her vocabulary, she uses general and some technical language. For instance, in her Spanish sample, she writes using historical facts and related vocabulary previously discussed in class. Nevertheless, the lack of needed vocabulary is sometimes evident for instance when instead of saying “los europeos” she prefers to stick to the words she is most familiar with such as “las personas de europa”. In terms of language control, Elizabeth is at a developing stage since generally her writing is comprehensible, but at times, meaning may be impeded by errors when attempting to produce more complex text as in this case “Con un buen inmunidad y mucho comida mas personas podían sobrevivir, cual creaban mas ideas buenas y mas technología avanzada para Europa” instead of “la inmunidad de los europeos y el excedente de comida acrecentaba la cantidad de personas que podían sobrevivir lo cual resultaba en la producción de mejores ideas y más tecnología avanzada”.  

Regarding Elizabeth’s spelling, I did notice some cases of spelling approximations reflecting cross-language transfer. Since Elizabeth’s dominant language is English, she uses the English code to spell Spanish words (and not vice versa). She did this in the case of writing “technología” for “tecnología”, and “Europe” for “Europa.” She also had an instance of confusion of word boundaries when she wrote “porque” instead of “por qué” (though this may also be a semantic confusion between the two expressions). Her Spanish writing sample had surprisingly fewer code-switching examples when compared to her speaking. This might be because of the thought process involved in writing when compared to speaking. It seems as if she was able to remain consistent in the usage of Spanish given more time to process and use other resources such as dictionaries to fill in the gaps in her vocabulary. I did not observe linguistic blending or semantic expressions. However, I did notice several instances of copying. She used capital letters and punctuation correctly for the most part, expect when placing a comma in front of the connecting  word “y” which is more commonly used in English as in the following sentence “Con mucho comida, los personas de Europa podían tener excelente comida, y desarrollaban permanente lugares para viviendo”. Another example of copying in punctuation includes the lack of the initial question mark that is required in Spanish and non-existent in English. I also observed fewer instances of grammatical errors due to lack of subject-verb agreement that were more prevalent in her speaking, but I did notice more instances of lack of article-noun-adjective agreement. Examples of lack of agreement include “un buen inmunidad,” “mucho comida,” “los personas” and “una tiempo larga.” A final example of copying related to syntax includes the usage of a gerund after a preposition instead of an infinitive after a preposition as it is the norm in Spanish. For instance Elizabeth wrote “lugares para viviviendo” (incorrect) instead of “lugares para vivir”.

Elizabeth clearly demonstrates a stronger ability to write in English due to receiving most of her education in this language. I strongly believe that her solid base in English and her ability to communicate ideas effectively and clearly in one language has helped her develop her writing skills in Spanish.