Brief report: the relationship between writing transcription skills and writing measures differs between children who self-report being monolingual or bilingual

Abstract

This study explores how the skills involved in writing are associated with written language measures in children who self-reported being bilingual or monolingual. Twenty children were matched for age and gender and took part in a writing task and a series of tasks to measure writing transcription skills. The results found that there was no difference in writing measures for either group. There was a different pattern of significant associations between transcription skills and writing measures for the two groups. The results are discussed in terms of different ways in which a complex task like writing can be accomplished successfully. IntroductionWriting is an important skill in the primary school curriculum in the UK (Department for Education 2011; Williams and Larkin in press). However, how a child's language abilities contribute to their writing and whether these contributions differ for monolingual children and bilingual children is an overlooked field of research and one that this study contributes towards. The specific focus in this study is on the transcribing skills of spelling, orthographic awareness and writing speed.Transcribing, or transcription, skills are often one of four processes that are thought to make up writing skills. For example, Berninger and Winn (2006) argued that transcription interacts with the processes that keep a writer working towards the goal of a written piece (executive functions), that generate language, and with a flexible memory store where information can be accessed from either of the three processes. Although frameworks like this show how complex writing is, it is not clear whether these processes interact in the same way for bilingual writers. Bilingual and monolingual adults, for example, perform differently on various language and executive control tasks (Bialystock, Craik, and Luk 2008).The present study asked children to self-report their competencies in English and a second language. The resultant groups were compared on a writing task that provided measures of writing quality and writing quantity. In addition, several transcription measures were taken, so that it was possible to assess the role of transcription skills in monolingual and bilingual children.