Bilingual Children’s Writing Development in Two-Way Immersion Programs

Abstract

This literature review article seeks to answer the ongoing question in the bilinguals’ writing development: “How do bilingual children develop writing in their first and second languages in two-way immersion (TWI) programs?” This is mainly because there has largely been a literature gap on understanding TWI students’ writing in spite of the increasing number of TWI programs and immigrant students. For this reason, children’s writing development in TWI was examined in four major areas: 1) writing product, which focuses on grammatical and semantic features, and achievement, 2) writing process, which focuses on skills, process, and strategies, 3) product-based cross-linguistic influence, and 4) process-based cross-linguistic influence. The findings reveal that bilinguals’ grammatical and semantic difficulties were drawn from differences between two languages and cultures, while bilinguals’ skills and strategies appeared to be different depending on the language of writing and the proficiencies of the writers. Research on cross-linguistic influence exhibited both positive and negative as well as forward and reverse transfer.