Bilingualism, an asset to future language acquisition?

The purpose of this essay was to find out whether bilingual students acquire an additional language more easily compared to monolingual students. In order to find evidence of this a field study was carried out focusing on the results of bilingal and monolingual students in National tests in English. The field study indicated that the monolingual students generally performed better in all parts of the test. The reason for this is mainly because of the fact that the bilingual students' greatest difficulty was spelling. The bilingual students did, however, outperform the monolingual students in a section where they had to explain words in a context by means of using other words. They also managed word ordering better and never used 'Swenglish' expressions in their written productions. It was therefore possible to draw the conclusion that bilingual students have a better metalinguistic awareness, that is, a deeper concious awareness about language and the use of language. No other significant differences between these students were found.Validerat; 20101217 (root