Influence of the sociolinguistic and educational context of Gibraltar on the development of orthographic competence

Abstract

In Gibraltar, English is the official language, used for instruction at schools, so the bilingual part of its population acquires Spanish orally in the family context. It is not after several years of compulsory schooling that this language is learned as a subject of foreign language. In this study, we intend to verify if this sociolinguistic, educational context has an impact on the development of written Spanish, and if this is reflected in the orthographic competence developed by bilingual speakers in the area, whose results will be compared with those found in a monolingual group from the province of Cádiz. Our hypothesis is that more spelling difficulties will be observed in Gibraltar than in the monolingual group, as a consequence of less exposure to written input in Spanish at school, which will be manifested as errors of both interlingual and intralingual nature. To do this, we will analyse the errors present in both groups, previously collected by means of lexical availability questionnaires. The results show a higher percentage of errors in Gibraltar, with interferences associated to the context of language contact, but also other intralingual errors possibly due to lower exposure to written Spanish during the first years of schooling.