Resumen de The Impact of Bilinguality on the Learning of English Vocabulary as a Foreign Language (L3)
Mohammad Hossein Keshavarz, Hamideh Astaneh
This study aimed at comparing the performance of two bilingual groups of EFL students with that of a monolingual group on a controlled productive ability vocabulary test. Altogether 30 Turkish-Persian bilinguals, 30 Armenian-Persian bilinguals, and 30 Persian monolinguals participated in the study. The subjects in all three groups were homogenoeous in terms of age (17–18 years old), sex (they were all female), nationality (they were all Iranian), and level of instruction (intermediate). The results of the data analyses showed that native speakers of Turkish and Armenian who speak Persian as their second language performed better in the English vocabulary test than the Persian monolingual learners of English. This can be attributed to the positive effect of the subjects' bilinguality on their third language vocabulary achievement. The study also revealed that in the area of vocabulary production and achievement the Armenian-Persian bilinguals who had learned their first and second languages both academically and orally were more successful than the Turkish-Persian bilinguals who had learned their first language only orally. The results are interpreted to have implications for EFL methodologists and syllabus designers.
