Title: The role of grammatical metaphor in the development of advanced literacy in Spanish as a first, second, and heritage language
Abstract: Abstract This paper draws some general conclusions from the evidence gathered by two recent analyses, which traced the development of advanced literacy by two undergraduate language learner populations: (1) Humanities students of the National Autonomous University of Mexico for whom Spanish is a native language (L1); and (2) Linguistics students enrolled at the University of California, Davis for whom Spanish is either a heritage (HL) or a second language (L2). Textual scrutiny of student texts extracted from the Corpus del Lenguaje Académico en Español (or CLAE : < www.lenguajeacademico.info >) documents positive trends in the acquisition of ideational grammatical metaphors both in the monolingual, Spanish-only university setting of Mexico, and in the Spanish-English bilingual context of California. In this analysis, I propose that, regardless of the participants’ native language(s), learners of Spanish undergo parallel developmental stages within Halliday’s model of language acquisition at the advanced level.