2017 Volume 2017 Issue 27 Pages 682-696
The aim of this study was to examine the ability of bilingual children in Germany to write compositions in Japanese. Most of the children attended German local schools from Monday to Friday and all of the children studied at a Japanese supplementary school on Saturday. The students were asked to write 2 types of compositions (a “narrative text” and an “expository text”) in Japanese in the 4th and 6th grades. Longitudinal analysis revealed the following key findings: 1) Children developed the ability to write at three levels: characters, their readings, and words; syntax; and discourse. Bilingual children did not improve as quickly or as much as children whose mother tongue was Japanese, but the ability of bilingual children to write steadily improved over 2 years. Bilingual children developed the ability to construct more complicated sentences in Japanese, but mistakes in the formal aspects and elements of language were evident; and 2) Children steadily improved in their ability to compose a “narrative text” more so than in their ability to compose an “expository text.” These findings suggest that the overlap and differences between bilingual students and monolingual students in terms of their development of the ability to write compositions in Japanese must be analyzed more closely through comprehensive analysis of the ability to write compositions in Japanese and comparative analysis of different types of compositions.
