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 fo-cussed 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 and 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 qualita-tive 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.