The Effect of Bilingualism on Improving English Speaking Skill among Iranian Arab Students

Because of fact that bilingualism and multilingualism have been incremented throughout the world, many researchers checked the effect of bilingualism in learning English. This study investigated the effect of bilingualism on Iranian EFL learners' speaking skill. In the first step, two intact classes from two senior high schools of Zarrindasht, Iran were chosen and they were assigned in two experimental groups; monolingual and bilingual. Then they were pretested through a researcher-made speaking test extracted from the students’ course book. When the participants were all pretested, the treatment was practiced on the both groups. After the treatment which took ۱۱ sessions, the researcher administered the modified version of the mentioned pre-test as the post-test to find out the effect of the bilingualism on speaking skill. When the data were collected, Independent and Paired Samples T-tests were run to analyze them. The results showed that bilingual group outperformed than the control group in the post-test. The findings indicated that bilingualism improved Iranian EFL learners' speaking skill.

Keywords:

Bilingual , monolingual , speaking skill.