A Comparative Study of the Writing Abilities of English-Speaking Grade 8 Students in French-Speaking Schools
Keywords:
French immersion, writing ability, syntactic maturity, T-unit analysis, narrative writingAbstract
This paper compares writing in two modes, narrative and argumentative, by English-speaking grade 8 students educated in French-speaking schools with that done by a group of similar children in a regular English program. The students' papers are compared for overall quality as measured by holistic scoring, for syntactic maturity as measured by T-unit analysis, and for surface feature control as measured by frequency of selected errors. In addition, the scores for syntactic maturity are compared to those presented in major studies of this aspect of writing development. Fifty writing variables do not differ significantly at the .05 level. The study strongly supports the view that education in a second language does not impair native-language abilities.
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