Degrees of bilingualism and its influence on pronunciation development in EFL learners

This study attempted to investigate how different degrees of bilingualism influence the performance of bilingual learners in pronunciation development in a third language I.e., acomparison was made between balanced and unbalanced bilinguals regarding how they acquire the phonology of a third language to see whether there is a significant differencebetween balanced and unbalanced bilinguals in phonology acquisition in a third language. 76 bilingual high school second graders took part in this study. This study employed an ex post facto design and as the attempt was to see the relationship between pronunciationdevelopment and degrees of bilingualism in two different groups, independent t-test was used to analyze the data. The results of the study revealed that balanced bilinguals outperformed their unbalanced counterparts in phonology acquisition in a third languagewhich in this case was English. The implications of this study maybe that these two groups of learners employ different strategies and have different attitudes and motivations towards learning a third language and that the teachers and curriculum developers should take these differences into account.

Keywords:

bilingualism , balanced bilinguals , unbalanced bilinguals , pronunciation development