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Uniqueness and overlap: Characteristics and longitudinal correlates of native Chinese children's writing in English as a foreign language*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2013

JUAN ZHANG ,
CATHERINE McBRIDE-CHANG ,
RICHARD K. WAGNER  and
SHINGFONG CHAN
JUAN ZHANG
Affiliation:
University of Macau
CATHERINE McBRIDE-CHANG*
Affiliation:
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
RICHARD K. WAGNER
Affiliation:
Florida State University
SHINGFONG CHAN
Affiliation:
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
*
Address for correspondence: Catherine McBride-Chang, The Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Room 359, Sino Building, Shatin, Hong Kong[email protected]
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Abstract

Longitudinal predictors of writing composition in Chinese and English written by the same 153 Hong Kong nine-year-old children were tested, and their production errors within the English essays across ten categories, focusing on punctuation, spelling, and grammar, were compared to errors made by ninety American nine-year-olds writing on the same topic. The correlation between quality of the compositions in Chinese and English was .53. In stepwise regression analyses examining early predictors at ages between five and nine years, tasks of speed or fluency were consistently uniquely associated with Chinese writing composition; measures of English vocabulary knowledge, word reading, or both were consistently uniquely associated with English writing quality. Compared to the American children, Chinese children's writing reflected significantly higher proportions of errors in all grammatical categories but did not differ in punctuation or spelling. Findings underscore both similarities and differences in writing at different levels across languages.

Keywords

second language writingwriting qualitylanguage transferlanguage production errorslongitudinal predictors
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , April 2014 , pp. 347 - 363
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

*

We are grateful that this research was primarily supported by Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Grant reference no: 451210), and secondarily supported by P50 HD052120 from NICHD.

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