Fluency and its relationship with typology, exposure and lexical retrieval in bilingual Persian-Swedish children’s writing

Abstract

Bilingual literacy not only supports academic success it also contributes to bilingual children's development of identity. However, not all contexts allow children to develop their writing fluency in their first language (L1) to the same degree as in their school language, their second language (L2). Few studies have explored bilingual children's writing fluency in two languages and most studies to date have focussed on Latin scripts, in particular English. The present paper fills this gap by exploring writing fluency of bilingual biscriptal children in the typologically different languages Swedish (official language and main medium of instruction) and Persian (home language). Twenty-three bilingual biscriptal children between the ages of 10-15 wrote four texts each by hand using Eye & Pen, descriptive and narrative, in Persian and Swedish respectively. The final texts and temporal information were used to compute product and process writing fluency. In order to explore writing fluency further, the role of language exposure and lexical retrieval was investigated. A survey was used to explore the participants' exposure at home and participants' lexical retrieval was measured by standardized tasks in each language. An additional qualitative study of three writers focused on what may have caused interruptions in fluency in the two languages. Results show that the children produced more characters, words and clauses and wrote faster, produced longer and more complex bursts in their L2 as compared with their L1. Exposure in L1 was connected with writing fluency in both languages while lexical retrieval was mildly related with fluency in L1. Typological characteristics such as diacritics created pauses and hence interrupted writing fluency in both languages.

Writing fluency predicted by reading, linguistic and cognitive skills in L1 and L2 in the writing of bilingual biscriptal Persian-Swedish children

“…It could also result in the production of shorter texts as they struggle to find words to convey their message and they may feel inclined to produce shorter texts. The results of this study are in line with a previous study on the same group of participants in which a significant relationship was found between lexical retrieval and writing fluency in children's L1, but not in their L2 (Johansson & Lindgren, 2021). Johansson and Lindgren (2021) described how the participants' writing in L1 appeared to function more like an L2 and was more consistent with findings from L2 studies.…”

“…Writers appear to have higher writing fluency in their L1 than their L2 (Miller et al, 2008;Schoonen et al, 2009), probably as a result of more experience. This assumption is confirmed by a recent study by Johansson and Lindgren (2021) suggesting that Persian-Swedish bilingual children in years 4 to 9 had higher writing fluency in their L2 (Swedish) than their L1 (Persian). These researchers reported that the children were more used to reading and possibly writing in their L2 (Swedish) than their L1 (Persian).…”

“…The questionnaires also demonstrated that they read more often in Swedish at home. An examination of their writing tasks and screening tests (Johansson & Lindgren, 2021) showed that they had higher writing fluency, measures of productivity and fluency, and lexical retrieval, assessed in terms of phonological and semantic fluency, in Swedish compared to Persian. They were more exposed to Swedish, the national language, (L2) than to Persian, the minority language, (L1) at school and in society.…”

“…Each indicator was operationalised for three text units: characters, words and clauses. For each level we counted the number in the participants' texts for productivity, and the number per second for fluency (for further information, see Johansson & Lindgren, 2021). The resulting dataset contained composite scores of measures of productivity and fluency on three units, across two genres and languages.…”

Discourse Analysis of Grammatical Cohesion Devices in Student Explanation Texts

“…One of the most critical factors in creating written texts is the mastery of discourse analysis because analysis has an important influence on drawing attention to the art of language, which puts the user's knowledge of phonological, grammatical, and lexical resources into action every time the language user achieves successful communication (Johansson & Lindgren, 2021). Moreover, there are four basic skills in English, including; listening, reading, speaking, that is not easy to master for students.…”