In most European countries bilingual people have the opportunity to learn writing skills only in the language they use at school. They use their first language orally in a family context, but do not learn to write in this language and therefore tend to be monolingual in written communication. However, the development of writing skills plays a central role in ensuring access to educational resources and professional career advancement. In this respect, previous studies show that further progress in the second language is limited if writing skills are not learned in the first language (see Cummins 2000).
However, little is known about which linguistic structures and discourse strategies bilingual students transfer from one language to the other in written discourse. With regard to bilingual Italian-German students, a research gap is evident in two respects: first, there are only a few studies that focus on this target group and second there are only limited findings on written competencies in these two languages. The majority of these studies have either worked with only oral data or with children (see Baake/Hoppe 2018, Birken-Silvermann 2005, Montanari et al. 2016, Serratrice 2007).
The following study aims to understand which linguistic structures are transferred in the written texts of bilingual Italian-German students and which strategies they use in order to compensate for possible missing linguistic patterns in both languages. The work also analyses what kind of biographical factors influence bilingual textual competence.
This paper presents the results of a cross-sectional study with 53 students with Italian as heritage language and German as early second language, conducted in 9th and 10th grades at schools in Munich, Germany. In the study were collected argumentative and narrative texts as well as biographical interviews in both languages.
The data analysis shows an interaction of written competencies in the two languages. The transfer of grammatical structures and discourse strategies is favored by certain language biographical factors (see Barberio 2021). In addition to the quantitative analysis of the texts, during the presentation examples from the text corpus will be discussed.
Literatur:
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Cummins, Jim (2000): Language, power, and pedagogy. Bilingual children in the crossfire. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
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Serratrice, Ludovica (2007): Referential cohesion in the narratives of bilingual English-Italian children and monolingual peers. In: Journal of Pragmatics. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language Studies, 26, 1058–1087.
