The study performed a battery of bilingual cognitive tests with nearly 500 elementary-age English learners and found the relationships between English writing performance and cognitive skills became stronger as grades increased. However, the relationships between English writing and Spanish cognitive and reading determinants were mixed, indicating working memory capacity was especially important in the population’s performance in learning to write in their second language. The findings not only shed light on how students learn to write, they could help lead to development of interventions to help English learners improve their writing abilities.
