A comparative study between monolingual and bilingual children in learning the French language (Field study on a sample of primary school students)

Abstract

The aim of this study is to know the role of growing up in a bilingual environment for learning a new language and we choose the French language. This by comparing a group of children who have acquired one mother language (Arabic dialect) and others who have been growing up in a bilingual language environment (Arabic and Berber language).

For this study, we selected a sample of ( n= 80) Fifth Grade Primary school children for both categories in the city of Setif, and we applied a set of research tools they are: the interview, observation, as well as evaluation tests, including an intelligence test that measures the mental abilities of children to ajust the sample,  and French-proficiency test that includes the following aspects: lexical, grammatical, morphological, and expressive ones. We adopted the descriptive comparative approach in this study.

We found that there are significant differences in the average children’s results between monolingual children and bilingual children in French-proficiency learning, in advantage for the monolingual children. This was evident in the results of the general hypothesis. However, the results in regards to the morphological and expressive level were not significant, because the period of education of the two categories does not enable each of these two levels.

Thus, we conclude that monolingual children have better abilities than bilingual children in learning a new language.