SIMULTANEOUS BILITERACY IN BILINGUAL EDUCATION: THE EFFECTS ON SPEECH CONNECTEDNESS AND READING OF 5TH GRADE CHILDREN
biliteracy; bilingual education; literacy; bilingualism; speech connectedness.
Recently we have seen a significant increase in the number of children registered in schools that offer bilingual curriculum or bilingual programs in Brazil. A detailed review by Williams and Lowrance-Faulhaber (2018) analyzed 35 articles on reading and writing in bilingual children and showed advantages in simultaneous biliteracy. The development of one language supported the other language, so, children used their knowledge of both languages, using translanguaging, bidirectionally; thereby, one language supporting the other in parallel. This research investigates the effects of bilingual education and simultaneous biliteracy on the levels of speech connectivity and reading fluency in portuguese and english with 31 students who are 10 years old and study in a bilingual school in Natal/RN. In this research, we used individual oral production and reading tasks in L1 and L2, also, we assessed proficiency in L2. Our findings argue for possible advantages of simultaneous biliteracy for the linguistic and cognitive development of children in biliteracy. Therefore, we argue that there is a concomitant development in the fluency and reading comprehension of bilingual students, as well as in the connectivity of oral production, without causing disadvantage to both, when we analyze the two languages in this context.