The Impact of Bilingualism on English Vocabulary Learning Among Middle School Students

Bilingualism as a complex psychological and socio-cultural linguistic behavior can be observed everywhere in the world. Being such a widespread issue, it has attracted increasing research interest in its effects on education, especially learning additional languages. In addition, bilingualism and its effects is a controversial issue and there are contradictory views in this regard. Some studies have evidenced on its positive effects while some others have provided counterevidence. The present study seeks to find out whether bilinguality of English learners influences their achievement of English vocabulary learning. Data were gathered from 45 Turkish-Persian female bilinguals, and 45 Persian female monolinguals through a multiple choice test of English vocabulary to measure vocabulary achievement and a Persian questionnaire to homogenize the participants. 35 bilinguals and 35 monolinguals were singled out from them in terms of similar age, level of instruction, socioeconomic states and educational context and data analysis was administrated to their scores. Result of the data analysis showed that there was not any difference between the performances of two groups. Regarding many advantages bilingualism has on individuals’ abilities, bilinguals did not outperform monolinguals. This can be attributed to influential factors such as level of threshold in the second language, lexical selection, distributed characteristics across languages, balanced vs. dominant bilinguals, and sensitivity to language as a system that bilinguals encounter in the process of learning vocabulary of additional languages