Macro- and micro-developmental changes in analytical writing of bilinguals from elementary to higher education

ABSTRACT

Analytical writing serves to learn and communicate learning. Our goal was to determine the impact of students’ bilingual profile, defined by self-evaluated bilingual competence, use of language(s) for mental operations and language(s) use across different contexts, on their developing analytical writing abilities. Catalan/Spanish bilinguals – in 6th and 10th grade and university students – produced three texts on the same topic along a set of classroom activities, and a fourth one, on a different topic, one month later. We traced changes in text length and structure as indicators of proficiency across school levels and texts and tested the contribution of participants’ linguistic profile on the observed changes. A Structural Equation Modeling on indicators of proficiency as growth parameters yielded a positive effect of self-evaluated bilingual proficiency on text length of the initial productions, whereas use of language for mental operations affected the rate of length increment across texts. Participants’ self-evaluations of their linguistic proficiency did not affect text structure. The multidimensionality of bilingualism contributes differentially to proficiency in analytical writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Analytical writing
• development
• bilingualism
• elementary school
• high school
• higher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The study was sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [grant number EDU2015-65980-R]. Some of these findings were presented as a paper at the 2019 IX International Conference on Language Acquisition AEAL Madrid, Spain. We have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Notes on contributors

Liliana Tolchinsky

Liliana Tolchinsky is currently Emeritus Professor in Linguistics at the University of Barcelona. Her research interests include language and literacy acquisition across the lifespan in multilingual contexts and discourse analysis.

Melina Aparici

Melina Aparici is an Associate Professor in cognitive and developmental psychology at the School of Psychology in Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She has been involved in research on language acquisition and development, particularly on morphosyntactic acquisition and discourse development. Currently, her research is mainly devoted to the development and assessment of spoken and written discourse, both in first and second language acquisition.

Hugo Vilar

Hugo Vilar is a Primary Education English Teacher and is currently working on his PhD in Language Teaching at the University of Barcelona with a scholarship from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. His research interests include writing development, text quality and argumentation.