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Abstract

Multilingual children often become biliterate, which means reading and writing in two or more languages, before or during the first years in school. It is shown that bilingual children can learn, compare and distinguish between two writing systems at the same time. However, when learning a second language, a crosslinguistic transfer at different linguistic levels is common between the learners’ first and second language. The aim of this study is to analyse written texts made by multilingual children in their first and second year of schooling with a focus on phonological transfer in order to understand if their spelling mistakes are influenced by their accent and the phonological structure of their first language. The results indicate that there is a phonological transfer depending on differences between Swedish and the child’s first language, but also spelling mistakes that are common for all Swedish children in the early stages of learning to write. All children in this study use more than one language on a daily basis in different social contexts. They have different language backgrounds, but teaching in school is only in Swedish.

Keywords

• Biliterate
• phonological transfer
• spelling mistakes
• writing in a second language