Abstract:

Globalization and growing migration affect the ways modern languages evolve and change. An important issue connected with language acquisition is bilingualism, which is related to language interference (Shin & Otheguy, 2013; Myers-Scotton, 2006; Wei, 2013). This mixed method study is aimed at firstly, analyzing the speech of Spanish bilinguals and secondly, suggesting the ways of using the authentic speech for language teaching purposes (Tavil, 2010). In particular, the authors were interested in the use of syntactic calques by Spanish bilinguals who are representatives of 1.5, the 2nd and the 3rd generations of immigrants in the United States (heritage speakers) (Rodríguez González & Knospe, 2019). The genre of video interview was chosen as the research material. The choice of this particular genre is explained by the fact that it involves spontaneous interaction between the interlocutors and allows language learners to observe the characteristics of spontaneous bilingual speech.
The data of the study is drawn from YouTube video hosting (https://www.youtube.com/) where the authors found video interviews (N=29) with the representatives of contemporary American and Spanish pop cultures (N=11). All of the celebrities are of either Latin American or Spanish descent and are heritage speakers of Spanish. The authors were focused on the linguistic analysis of interviewees’ speech. For the purposes of linguistic description of authentic speech, we transcribed the texts of the video interviews and singled out sentences relevant for further analysis (N=1604) since these were the examples of language interference and contained syntactic calques (N=107). The syntactic calques that were allocated in the transcribed texts were classified according to their morphosyntactic properties. The most frequently used syntactic calques are those associated with changes in the use of pronouns (42%), verb forms and verb groups (41%), noun phrases (11%) and structures with coordination and subordination (6%). Qualitative method was applied to reveal and compare the types of syntactic calques used in the video interviews. The data showed that syntactic calques represent a productive type of transference in the speech of Spanish bilinguals.
Linguistic analysis of the revealed cases of interference allowed to collect important data for language teaching purposes. Syntactic calques are found not only at the level of idiolects, but also represent certain patterns that are characteristic of heritage native speakers of Spanish. The number of syntactic calques and their nature depends on the national version of the Spanish language spoken by the bilingual and on the age at which he/she immigrated to the United States.
The study proved that video interviews are important authentic material for teaching Spanish as a foreign language. We suggest that although the presence of syntactic calques and other types of interference might impede teachers from using video interviews as models of language to follow by students, video interviews still present valuable material for advanced Spanish students whose L1 is English. Watching authentic interviews with heritage Spanish speakers and studying syntactic calques may benefit students’ general metalinguistic competence and help in raising their linguistic awareness in terms of the geographical variability of Spanish. The study can be viewed as a descriptive contribution to the growing literature of heritage language studies.

Keywords:

Authentic texts, bilingualism, Spanish, heritage language, syntactic calques.