The development of written expression in immigrant children from 6 to 9 years old

Elisa De Las Fuentes Gutiérrez

doi:10.1515/opli-2020-0008

Abstract

AbstractThis article presents the results of a pilot study carried out based on texts from 15 immigrant children aged 6 to 9 years, who are learning Spanish in situations of immersion in the Communities of Madrid and Castilla-La Mancha. The aim is to understand how these students try to integrate into the school context and especially to determine whether the development of written expression during the early years of primary education allows them to carry out more complex linguistic actions aimed at communication, such as expressing positive attitudes towards the recipient. These actions may reveal the need to communicate and, therefore, the need to learn the language in order to integrate. The texts were taken from the ESCONES Corpus and were collected in a prior study on lexical retrieval and auditory perception in the development of communicative skills in children aged 6 to 9. The analysis carried out considered the vocabulary used, syntactic complexity and the use of linguistic actions in the different grades and found that the development of written expression may allow students to better express actions related to manifesting positive feelings and attitudes towards their interlocutor.

Highlights

In recent years, the presence of increasingly multicultural and plurilingual students in central Spain has compelled schools to update their educational programmes to promote the coexistence of different languages and cultures in the classroom, thereby encouraging the exchange of social values that enrich the teaching/learning process.Today, Spanish classrooms have newly arrived students with a total lack of knowledge of the language of schooling, but schools in central Spain have children who have been living in the country for over a year with partial knowledge of the language, and second-generation immigrant children, whose parents immigrated from their countries of origin years ago
The authors decided to analyse the written production of these children due to the findings of a previous study on lexical retrieval and auditory perception in the communicative skills of children aged 6 to 9 (Fuentes Gutiérrez 2019); this study found there were numerous linguistic actions aimed at communication, constant references to the recipient and messages created with a specific communicative intention – aspects that are, in principle, relevant to communication with the recipient
These texts were analysed with the general objective of determining whether the development of written expression throughout the early years of primary education allows students to carry out more complex linguistic actions aimed at communication, which may reveal their need to communicate in order to integrate and, their need to learn the language

Summary

Introduction

The presence of increasingly multicultural and plurilingual students in central Spain has compelled schools to update their educational programmes to promote the coexistence of different languages and cultures in the classroom, thereby encouraging the exchange of social values that enrich the teaching/learning process.Today, Spanish classrooms have newly arrived students with a total lack of knowledge of the language of schooling, but schools in central Spain have children who have been living in the country for over a year with partial knowledge of the language, and second-generation immigrant children, whose parents immigrated from their countries of origin years ago. In the Community of Castilla-La Mancha, primary school students learn the target language in contexts of immersion, within the classroom, in all years; in Madrid, students in stage two of primary school may enter link classrooms (aulas de enlace) for a maximum period of 9 months if they have no knowledge of the language of schooling. After this period, they must join their usual classrooms and continue to learn the language through immersion. The situation requires teachers to receive training to manage cultural and linguistic diversities, which is essential for meeting the needs of immigrant students

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