The Writing of Anglo and Hispanic Elementary School Students in Bilingual, Submersion, and Regular Programs

Abstract

The purpose of this descriptive cross-sectional study was to describe and rate the writing of Hispanic students in a bilingual program and to compare their writing with that of Hispanic students in a submersion program and with native English speakers in a regular program. Five dependent variables were investigated: rhetorical effectiveness, overall quality of writing, productivity, syntactic maturity, and error frequency. Analyses of variance for both grade and program revealed that the sixth graders had significantly higher scores than did the fourth graders on all of the dependent variables except for error frequency. The students in the regular program had significantly higher scores on rhetorical effectiveness and overall quality of writing than did the submersion program students and the bilingual program students; they also made significantly fewer errors than did the bilingual program students. The bilingual program students had significantly higher scores on syntactic maturity and productivity than did the submersion program students. Results suggest that students who learn to write in their L1 before learning to write in their L2 will write just as effectively in their L2 as those students who learn to write only in their L2.