The development of written expression in immigrant children from 6 to 9 years old

• Main Author: de las Fuentes Gutiérrez Elisa
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter 2020-05-01
• Series: Open Linguistics
• Subjects: written expression; communication; l2 spanish; immigrant students; integration; primary education; attitudes; speech acts; l2 written corpora
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2020-0008

This article presents the results of a pilot study carried out based on texts from 15 immigrant children aged 6 to 9 years, who are learning Spanish in situations of immersion in the Communities of Madrid and Castilla-La Mancha. The aim is to understand how these students try to integrate into the school context and especially to determine whether the development of written expression during the early years of primary education allows them to carry out more complex linguistic actions aimed at communication, such as expressing positive attitudes towards the recipient. These actions may reveal the need to communicate and, therefore, the need to learn the language in order to integrate. The texts were taken from the ESCONES Corpus and were collected in a prior study on lexical retrieval and auditory perception in the development of communicative skills in children aged 6 to 9. The analysis carried out considered the vocabulary used, syntactic complexity and the use of linguistic actions in the different grades and found that the development of written expression may allow students to better express actions related to manifesting positive feelings and attitudes towards their interlocutor.