Since the development of Cummins Interdependence theory, research has shown an increasing interest in positive effects of bilingualism resulting in a plethora of studies on language transfer in the field of applied or educational linguistics. Recent studies conducted on language transfer have revealed positive effects of bilingualism for the development of metalinguistic awareness in reading, thus, heightening the need for investigations of bilingual writing. According to previous research on reading, bilingual children possess a high metalinguistic awareness, which results in transferring of reading skills and phonological strategies (Byalistok 2005, Laurant/Martinot 2010). Moreover, research agrees on positive effects of bilingualism for the acquisition of morphological awareness. Thus, bilingual children have shown a high morphological awareness, which is viewed as a complex phenomenon consisting of phonological, semantic, syntactic, and orthographic processing (Deacon et al 2007, Ramirez et al 2010). The research to date has focused primarily on the investigation of (positive) transfer in reading competence of bilingual children attending bilingual schools. However, the transfer of writing skills between the languages of bilingual children, who acquire literacy in their heritage language without institutional support, is still under-researched. The aim of the present study is, therefore, to examine the influence of written competency in Russian as heritage language on students’ performance in German. The aim of this research is thus to determine, whether bilingual children can profit from writing skills in their heritage language.

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