When kids juggle it all: Biliteracy instruction and the development of discourse connectedness in L1 and L2 writing

Abstract

The present longitudinal study explored how bilingual educational contexts shape children's cognitive and linguistic development. Its main goal was to investigate the development of discourse connectedness (measured by long-range connectedness - LSC) in written narratives in Portuguese (L1) and English (L2) by 78 children of a bilingual school in Brazil within a year span (from 2021 to 2022). Participants created a narrative in their L1 or L2 based on a sequence of five images, which were analyzed with the computational tool SpeechGraphs (Mota et al., 2014). Connectedness scores were expected to vary as a function of Language (L1, L2) and of Year of data collection (Time 1, Time 2), favoring, respectively, the L1 and Time 2. The results confirmed our hypotheses, with long-range recurrence (LSC) scores in the L1 narratives higher than in the L2 at both times of data collection. In addition, the longitudinal analysis revealed higher connectedness scores for narratives written in Time 2 in both languages. Overall, our findings indicate that the children's performance in terms of connectedness progressed in a parallel way in the two languages during the school years, with an expected advantage for the narratives written in their dominant language. In addition, they highlight the potential of using SpeechGraphs - a cost-effective, non-invasive computational tool - to analyze children's use of two prestige languages in a particular bilingual educational context.