The role of first and second language reading, first language low‐level skills, and working memory in second language writing

Abstract Our research investigated how L2 and L1 reading, L1 low‐level skills and working memory are related to ratings and the linguistic characteristics (productivity, cohesion, lexical sophistication and diversity, syntactic complexity, and accuracy) of argumentative and narrative texts. The research was conducted in Hungary with 95 secondary school students whose proficiency ranged from pre‐intermediate to high upper intermediate. Participants’ L1 reading and L1 low‐level skills were assessed with validated instruments in Hungarian and working memory with the backward digit span test. We administered three L2 reading comprehension tasks from the Cambridge English First for Schools test. Participants wrote a narrative and an argumentative essay. L2 reading scores were significantly associated with raters’ perceptions of writing quality and measures of linguistic performance. The relationship between L1 reading on L2 writing was mediated by L2 reading. L2 reading scores were significantly related to productivity, grammatical accuracy, lexical diversity and sophistication and the organization of the written texts highlighting the substantial role of shared L2 grammatical and lexical resources and importance of reading skills for monitoring and revising L2 written output. Participants with higher L1 reading ability and L1 low‐level skills scored higher on spelling and mechanics and organization in the narrative text and used fewer connectives in the argumentative text. The narrative texts of students with lower L1 low‐level skills contained more spelling errors. Working memory played a limited role in L2 writing. Implications of findings for researching and teaching L2 reading and writing are discussed.