A longitudinal study on the writing development of Japanese-English bilingual students

2015 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26884042
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Research Activity Start-up
• Allocation Type: Single-year Grants
• Research Field: Foreign language education
• Research Institution: Hokkaido Bunkyo University
• Principal Investigator: Sano Aiko 北海道文教大学, 外国語学部, 准教授 (20738356)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-08-29 – 2016-03-31
• Keywords: バイリンガル教育 / 作文発達 / 継承語教育

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Three pedagogical implications emerged out of analyses of pre-writing strategies (PWS) and the writing expertise of bilingual writers; 1) the importance of instructive strategies that cultivates the use of entire linguistic repertoire of bilingual students, 2) the importance of explicit teaching of PWS to those who have limited writing abilities in both of the languages, and 3) the heightened importance of teaching PWS for heritage language learners in particular. The importance of teaching for enhancing not only the varieties of single words but also the varieties of lexical bundles, or set of several words, in the teaching of bilingual writing was also pointed out in the analysis of the development of productive vocabularies. Finally, through the qualitative analysis of interviews that were conducted with the parents of these bilingual writers, it was revealed how conscious support from the parents at home benefits the biliteracy development of young bilingual students.

Free Research Field

バイリンガル教育