The cohesive patterning in the written texts of bilingual Russian-German second graders

Abstract

The cohesive patterning is an important aspect of textual competence that plays a crucial role in the educational context and in literacy development. This paper investigates the types of cohesive patterning in the written texts of 12 Russian-German (8 simultaneous and 4 sequential) bilingual second graders and contributes therefore to the research of the biliteracy development peculiarities at primary school age. Furthermore, the paper focuses on the possible impact factors which could influence the microstructural coherent performance in both languages. For this, a mixed-method study design was chosen which combines the quantitative and qualitative data analysis. In addition to the text corpus which contains 12 German and 12 Russian narratives composed on the basis of given picture stimuli, sociolinguistic data were elicited from parental interviews. The data analysis shows tendentially more elaborate cohesive patterning in German than in Russian texts. This corresponds to the previous assumptions that textual competence should be considered as a cultural achievement which can be successfully attained in the institutionalized educational context despite of bilingualism type. The influencing role of the heritage language instruction on the textual competence development in Russian could not be proved. Instead, the three presented case-studies imply that the bilingual children’s motivation and literal practices are important impact factors.