English writing development of young plurilingual children

Learning to tell stories and express ideas through an English print modality is a challenge faced by young, plurilingual children attending English language schools in Canada. Writing even very short English narratives is a cognitively complex juggling act for emerging writers. Plurilingual children are thought to leverage their experience with diverse spoken language and scripts to support learning how to use an English writing system to represent a mental model of propositional content. The present study explores how the intensity of use of multiple spoken languages and scripts mediates English writing development. A sample of 222 plurilingual children were assigned to 3 groups, based on the intensity of their use of multiple spoken languages in social communication with others in their homes, schools, and communities. English writing samples collected at the end of first and second grade were analyzed using 46 codes that represented how the plurilingual children used English language system conventions (e.g., nouns, verbs, relative clauses) and linguistic devices (e.g., argument overlap, anaphoric pronoun reference) to create meaning and cohesion in their English writing. Findings revealed that compared to children in the low-intensity language group, children in the high-intensity language group wrote narratives that were more cohesive and legible. The use of English spoken system devices (argument overlap; deixis), and language system conventions (nouns, third person pronouns, verbs, prepositional phrases) was not found to differ among the language intensity groups. Taken together, the finding provide insight into how the multiple language experience of plurilingual experience influences how they use an English writing system functionally to represent action, create cohesion and denote causal and temporal relations.