Spanish vs. English mediated lectures: A contrastive approach to the use of evidential markers

Abstract

In the last ten years, Spanish universities have started to incorporate English as a means of instruction. As a consequence, many lecturers –who regularly use their mother tongue for their teaching activity– have adapted their syllabus contents into English, resulting in lectures that show evidence of cross-linguistic influence (Odlin, 1993). The goal of this paper is to analyze the use and distribution of evidentials in Spanish and English mediated lectures by the same teachers and to evaluate the extent to which linguistic interference is made visible when it comes to the use of evidentiality. To this aim, a corpus of three Engineering lectures delivered in English and three Engineering lectures delivered in Spanish by the same native speakers of Spanish lecturers has been used as a means of exemplification.

Keywords

• evidentiality
• cross-linguistic influence
• source language interference
• English mediated education
• Tertiary Education