Translation Skills and Trade-Off in Young L2 Learners’ Written Narrations

In Flemish primary schools, 8-year-old children are expected to produce written texts that meet a gradually increasing number of content-related and formal demands. Teachers are very much aware that writing requires a lot of effort from their young pupils. For pupils who must write in a language that is not their mother tongue, the challenge may be even more daunting. For these pupils, finding the right words to convey their ideas or intentions is particularly hard work, especially when they are expected to produce the kind of academic language with which they are not familiar at home; this challenge, for instance, is the case for children of low-SES* parents. As a result, it should come as no surprise that the written output produced by young low-SES, second language learners is scored lower in terms of text quality compared to the written output of high-SES, L1 speakers (Braun, Forges, & Wolmainck, 1997; Krom, Verhelst, & Veldhuijzen, 2004).