McGill researchers who examined the writing skills of teenagers in Montreal found that the performance in French of English-French bilinguals was similar to that of near-monolingual francophones. Bilinguals were defined as teens raised in anglophone or bilingual (English-French) households and who had had significant exposure to French through attending French-language school. Further, the English writing skills of the bilingual participants were found to be on par with their French writing skills.
“While we were expecting to observe differences in the writing of bilingual adolescents compared to monolinguals, based on previous studies with bilingual children, both groups performed similarly. This may be because English-French bilinguals in Montreal live in a context where both languages are well supported,” explained Eve Julie Rioux, a PhD student at the McGill School of Communication Sciences and Disorders and first author of the study.