Description of the written interlanguage in spanish of haitian secondary students at a school in Santiago, Chile

Abstract:

This article is framed in the studies of Applied Linguistics to the teaching-learning of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) and investigates through the analysis of errors in a written sample the interlanguage in Spanish of 36 Haitian students, in a school in Santiago, Chile. The error analysis allows to show that in the three levels studied (lexical, grammatical and textual), there are aspects of Spanish which are already internalized in learners´ interlanguage. The characteristic features of this interlanguage are a tendency to omit elements, mainly structural; preference for the use of singular forms; use of lexemes with common non-interchangeable semantic features; inconsistency in conjugation, with a tendency to use the infinitive in inappropriate contexts; and the presence of elements of the oral record in writing. The psycholinguistic strategies that would explain these errors are of an inter- and intralinguistic nature.

Keywords:
interlanguage; error analysis; writing; school; immigrants