Grammaticality intuitions of bilingual and monolingual Basque EFL learners

Abstract

Research has seen the greater flexibility and enhanced metalinguistic awareness of the bilingual mind as factors that can contribute to facilitating the acquisition of a third language. The aim of this study was to find out whether bilingualism does in fact have a positive effect on language awareness. Bilingualism (Basque-Spanish) was expected to be associated with higher levels of language awareness. Sixty bilingual and sixty monolingual students were asked to complete a grammaticality judgment task (implicit knowledge) with correction of sentences judged to be ungrammatical (explicit knowledge). The analyses carried out comparing the results of the same age groups show statistically significant differences in favor of the monolingual learners both in their implicit and their explicit knowledge of English. Our results support previous work which shows that monolinguals do not seem to be at a disadvantage when learning a foreign language.