The written competence of spanish secondary education students in bilingual and non-bilingual programs

Abstract

The present study compares bilingual and non-bilingual program students' L2 written competence. Three hundred and ninety-three secondary education students participated in the study. The results obtained show that: (a) there are significant differences in written competence between the bilingual and the non-bilingual program groups, with the bilingual program group outperforming the non-bilingual program group; (b) the four measures used to assess writing (fluency, accuracy, lexical and grammatical complexity) develop in tandem; (c) bilingual programs may help to diminish the differences observed in favour of female students when learning a foreign language; and (d) there are significant relationships between all the writing measures studied.