Innovation in Language Learning

The present study aims to analyse and compare the written competence of two groups of secondary education students: one enrolled on a bilingual programme and another group enrolled on a non-bilingual programme, including in the analysis grade and gender. Three hundred and ninety-three students in the third and fourth year of compulsory secondary education participated in the study. For the present study, the data come from a written composition activity, which was administered to participants in their own classroom. Four writing measures were used to analyse the written production of the learners: fluency, accuracy, grammatical complexity and lexical complexity. A statistical analysis was carried out with the program R Development Core Team 2012, version 2.15. The results obtained show that: (a) there are significant differences in written competence between the bilingual and the non-bilingual programme groups, with the bilingual program group outperforming the non-bilingual programme group; (b) a trend of development in written competence from third to fourth grade is observed in both groups indicating that the measures of fluency, accuracy, grammatical and lexical complexity progress at the same rate; (c) bilingual programmes 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.