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

• Published in: Cognitive development 2025-01, Vol.73, p.101535, Article 101535
• Main Authors: Finger, Ingrid, Lemke, Cristiane Ely, Cury, Larissa da Silva, Mota, Natália Bezerra, Weissheimer, Janaina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bilingual writing development; Discourse connectedness; Graph analysis; Narrative writing
• ISSN: 0885-2014
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2024.101535

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. •There seems to be an interrelated development of written narrative skills in contexts of biliteracy instruction.•As children's schooling advances, their discourse connectedness in written narratives increases in both languages in a parallel fashion.•L2 connectedness scores were significantly lower than L1 scores, due to their greater exposure to the L1.•Children who wrote more connected narratives in their L1 are also the ones who wrote more connected texts in their L2.