This study explores the maintenance of English writing skills among multilingual returnee students after reentering the Japanese educational context. Using descriptive analysis based on quantitative indicators, the study examines the writing performance of four returnee students who grew up overseas, employing the Test of Written Language–Fourth Edition (TOWL-4) as a standardized assessment tool. TOWL-4 evaluates six subdomains of writing ability: vocabulary, spelling and punctuation, logical sentences, sentence combining, contextual conventions, and story composition. The distribution of scores across these subskills was analyzed to identify relative patterns of skill maintenance. The results indicate that meaning-based and generative skills, such as vocabulary use, contextual conventions, and narrative composition, were relatively well maintained. In contrast, analytically demanding and operational skills̶such as spelling and punctuation, logical sentence revision, and sentence combining̶showed comparatively lower performance. These findings suggest that the maintenance of English writing skills among returnee students varies by subskill domain. In particular, higher-order academic writing skills that require precise linguistic processing appear to be difficult to sustain without continuous and structured training environments.
Jiro WATANABE (Mon,) studied this question.