Strategic codeswitching, interliteracy, and other phenomena of emergent bilingual writing: Lessons from first grade dual language classrooms

TLDR

The study was conducted in two first‑grade Spanish/English bilingual classrooms in the northeastern United States. The study examined how eight emergent bilingual first‑graders compose stories in both Spanish and English within a Writing Workshop setting. Researchers observed students for six months, conducted interviews about writing behaviors, and collected writing samples at all stages of the process. Analysis revealed both shared and distinct cross‑linguistic skills and transfer patterns, and identified strategic codeswitching, positive literacy transfer, and interliteracy, which informed a preliminary model of bilingual writing development for English‑dominant and Spanish‑dominant learners.

Abstract

This qualitative study investigated the writing processes of eight emergent bilingual children as they composed stories in two languages in a Writing Workshop (WW) context. The research was situated in two grade 1 classrooms in a Spanish/English Two-Way Bilingual Education program in the north-eastern USA. For six months, researchers observed students in Spanish and English WWs, interviewed students about their writing behaviors and understandings, and collected samples from all stages of the writing process. Cross-case analyses of individual bilingual writing profiles revealed similarities and differences in students’ cross-linguistic skills, as well as patterns of transfer. Patterns of bilingual writing related to strategic codeswitching, positive literacy transfer, and interliteracy led to the development of a preliminary model of bilingual writing development for English-dominant and Spanish-dominant bilingual learners.This model presents phenomena unique to bilingual writers, relates these to bilingualism and biliteracy, and proposes anticipated expression of the phenomena for developing Spanish-dominant and English-dominant bilingual writers.