Interactional resources in the letters of young writers in Swedish and English

•We examine interactional resources in children's L1 and FL personal letters 78.•Language impact on amount of production but little on interactional resources 80.•Writers show multi-competence in use of interactional resources in writing 77.•Gender had a stronger impact on interactional resources than language 72.

This study examines the use of interactional resources in letters to a penfriend of Swedish 11-year-olds in Swedish (L1) and English (FL) from a multi-competence perspective. The objectives of the study are to ascertain whether the language in which the letters were written and the gender of the writers influenced the extent to which interactional meanings were expressed, and also to examine the textual resources that the young novice writers employed to convey interactional meanings in FL. The texts are analysed in terms of both content and discourse-semantic expression, with the discourse-semantic analysis drawing on a Systemic Functional Linguistic framework known as Appraisal. The quantitative results show that, when the amount of text produced is taken into account, there are few significant differences in the frequency of expression of interactional meanings in L1 and FL, but slightly more for gender. The qualitative description identifies a number of language-specific and non-language specific resources used by the writers to enable them to express interactional meanings in FL. In the discussion, these findings are linked to the notion of multi-competence.