This study investigates the development of academic writing skills in Turkish-German bilingual pupils with a focus on the pupils' syntactic complexity development in both languages. The influence of bilingual education on the academic writing skills in the pupils' first and second languages as well as the mutual influences of both languages on each other forms the central pillar of this work. In order to investigate the impact of bilingual vs. monolingual education for bilingual children two groups are compared to each other: Group A is made up of pupils from a bilingual school with Turkish and German as instruction languages from the first grade onwards, while Group B is made up of pupils in a German monolingual school offering Turkish as a second foreign language from the seventh grade on.
The analysed data was collected within the framework of the MULTILIT Project, funded by the German DFG and French ANR, and consists of texts written by pupils in their 7th, 10th and 12th grades. The study distinguishes itself from many other publications in the field of language acquisition through two main points: 1) by analysing the academic writing skills and language development of multilingual pupils in their first and second languages and 2) investigating the influence of multilingual vs. monolingual education settings on bilingual pupils' language development. One of the key findings of this study is that the bilingually educated pupils use comparatively more complex syntax more frequently than their peers from the monolingual school. Furthermore, bilingually educated pupils show less deviations from the norm (mistakes/errors) in morphology and syntax in both languages than their monolingually educated bilingual peers.
