ERIC Number: EJ1142484
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2017-Jun
Pages: 22
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0922-4777
EISSN: N/A
Social Perspective Taking: A Benefit of Bilingualism in Academic Writing
Hsin, Lisa; Snow, Catherine
Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, v30 n6 p1193-1214 Jun 2017
The task of writing arguments requires a linguistic and cognitive sophistication that eludes many adults, but students in the US are expected to produce texts that articulate and support a claim--simple written arguments--starting in the fourth grade. Students from language-minority homes likewise must learn to produce such writing, despite their relatively limited experience with the English language, reflected in the availability of smaller mental lexicons and more restricted syntactic constructions. Yet some features of bilingual children's cognition, such as precocious development of theory of mind and strong metalinguistic awareness, might support the crafting of arguments in writing, where the explicit consideration of multiple points of view can serve to strengthen one's case for a claim. In this study we examine the incidence of social perspective-taking acts in the argumentative essays of language-minority and English-only students in Grades 4-6 and find that language-minority students match or surpass the English-only students on two critical measures of perspective taking (perspective acknowledgment and perspective articulation). We also explore possible links between students' use of perspective taking in their argumentative essays and a validated formal measure of the same skill, uncovering different relationships between them in the two language groups. Links to previously attested bilingual advantages and to the development of argumentation are discussed.
Descriptors: Perspective Taking, Educational Benefits, Bilingualism, Writing (Composition), Academic Discourse, Persuasive Discourse, Language Minorities, Bilingual Students, Theory of Mind, Metalinguistics, Essays, Elementary School Students, Grade 4, Grade 5, Grade 6, Native Speakers, Comparative Analysis, Contrastive Linguistics
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Education; Grade 4; Intermediate Grades; Grade 5; Middle Schools; Grade 6
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A