Effect of bilingualism on foreign language skills: A comparison of bilinguals and monolinguals

Bilingualism, having control of two languages or using two languages in daily life of a person, might be a result of globalization and immigration of people It has become very common phenomenon among the scholars. The question arises in this study whether being bilingual has an overall advantage on a person's life or vice versa. Bialystok (2001) expresses that bilingualism enhances the development of a general cognitive function concerned with attention and inhibition, and that facilitating effects of bilingualism are found on tasks and processes in which this function is most required. Moreover, Baker & Jones (1998) emphasize some social aspects of being bilingual as follows; a bilingual child may speak in one language with his/her parents and in another language with his/her friends and this may enable the child to establish a more intimate and strong way of relationship with parents, Another social advantage may be that the child may have strong family ties with relatives who live in different cities and speak in a different language if the child is bilingual. However if not, the relationship with relatives may be to some extent lost gradually. The authors further add that the same broader relationship occurs in the community as well in that the child may be able communicate in a school having multinational students. Bilingual children may have more language sensitivity for which they always think very carefully to choose the best words or utterances in a social situation. Finally as for cultural richness, bilinguals may have richer cultural knowledge and understanding towards cultures as they learn the culture of the language they use as well. The objective of this study is to compare reading and writing skills of Enlish as a foreign language for two bilingual groups, Turkish-Kurdish and Turkish-Arabic and one Turkish monolingual group. The groups were determined according to a specific exam result, SBS ( high school entrance exam for secondary school children). Each of the groups had a four month training to practice basic English tenses-Present Simple, Present Continuous, Past Simple, Past Continuous, Future Simple and Be going to- withing reading context and supplementary exercises. To pretests and posttests were used to evaluate the students' improvement between two exam periods. The bilingual groups use both languages Turkish-Kurdish or Turkish-Arabic actively in their daily lives. Two writing tasks covering the usage of related tense structures were given to students in the pretests and posttests and both reading and writing scores were assessed by means of SPSS program. The bilingual groups were born and brought up in Siirt, a southeastern town in the Republic of Turkey which has a three language speaking population. Monolinguals of Turkish are mainly from Western regions where the dominant language is Turkish. They have come to Siirt mostly because of their parents' occupational duties. All of the students were provided initially a background questionnaire to determine which group they belonged to in the study and how many grades they got from SBS exam. ( 17 English questions in the exam.) 135 students were chosen among 272 students according to their mean scores from the SBS exam and 45 were chosen for each group. The students were given KET (Key English Test) by Cambridge University for pretest and posttest implementation. After four months of training, the same exams were applied and the difference between pretests and posttests was calculated and evaluated according to some statistical tests. According to posttest results, Turkish-Kurdish bilinguals outnumbered their counterparts in terms of reading skill in English. Moreover, TAB group also outnumbered TM group in reading. The writing scores in the pretests seemed to be very low initially but in the posttest writing scores were higher than those of pretests. It was concluded that all of the groups showed some improvement in their writing abilities. However, when the groups' performances in writing were compared, they appeared to get almost the same grades from the writing tasks. To sum up, a meaningful difference in terms of reading scores was seen among the groups but there was not such a meaningful difference among the groups in writing tasks. As writing seems to be a more productive and difficult skill by the students, this results may not be such surprising but the main focus was on reading during the whole training period and the results revealed that there was a significant advantage of bilinguals as for their reading skills in English over their monolingual counterparts.