Abstract

This talk will focus on the challenges which the school-based written register poses for immigrant pupils in bidialectal settings, namely, settings where the spoken language (nonstandard variety) is, to some extent, structurally different from the written language (standard variety). The bidialectal community which provided the context for this research is Cyprus. The findings which will be reported and discussed in this talk emerged from a mixed methods investigation which compared the written production of 12-year-old immigrant and non-immigrant pupils with the aim of casting light on their shared and distinct writing challenges. The qualitative phase of this investigation yielded a typology of writing challenges, while its quantitative component provided indications as regards the severity of these challenges in the two groups. Drawing on the findings of this research, this talk will discuss the linguistic complexities with which immigrant pupils are confronted at school and also demonstrate the performance gap which appears to exist between immigrant and nonimmigrant pupils on the bidialectal island of Cyprus.