longitudinal investigation of connectedness and syntactic complexity in the written production of bilingual children during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The present study aimed at investigating, in a longitudinal way, connectedness and syntactic complexity in written narratives in Portuguese (L1) and English (L2) produced by 5th and 6th grade children enrolled in a bilingual school. For the evaluation of connectedness (thought organization), we used the computational tool SpeechGraphs (MOTA et al., 2012, 2016, 2019); syntactic complexity was verified through the analysis of T-Units and the Subordination Index (HUNT, 1965). Children were asked to write narratives in both languages based on sequences of pictures twice, first in August 2020 and then in August 2021. The longitudinal analysis showed that children wrote more syntactically complex texts in Portuguese, their L1, in both phases of data collection. In addition, they also wrote more connected narratives (LSC – long-range recurrence) and more syntactically complex texts in Portuguese in 2021, in comparison to 2020. With respect to their L2, however, no significant growth was perceived in the connectedness or complexity scores, which could also be interpreted as an effect of the pandemic on the development of students' L2 writing, since children had significantly fewer opportunities to interact in English in online classes, which may have impacted their development of productive skills in their L2.