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Writing in Two Languages: An Exploratory Case Study of Autobiographic Writings by Japanese-English Bilingual Students

Kyoko Motobayashi

University of Toronto

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Volume 15, No.1

December, 2009

The Japan Journal of Multilingualism and Multiculturalism

多言語多文化研究

bsig.org

This study reports on an analysis of bilingual autobiographic essays written by Japanese-English speaking junior high school students about their transcultural experiences. It focuses on the relationship between the content of the essays and the language used in writing them. Drawing on the notion of language dependency in bilinguals’ linguistic production, an argument which assumes that the language used in an autobiographic narrative may have some impact on the content of the narrative, it reports three phenomena found in the essays of these students: The essays written in the language of experience showed more detailed descriptions; the essays in the language of experience include some information that was not found in the other essay; and the episodes experienced in the language used in writing are referred to first in the essay.