Paper Title
A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON BILINGUALS AND MONOLINGUAL LEARNER\' READING COMPREHENSIONAbstract
The aim of this study was to investigate the differences between simultaneous bilingual and Iranian EFL monolingual learners on reading comprehension. To perform this study, 110 third grade three high school bilingual and monolingual participants studying in four different schools of Mahshahr were selected non-randomly. Then, the four groups were given a teacher-made pre-test of reading comprehension before the treatment to determine how well the participants know the contents. During an eight session courses, four groups covered eight passages selected from Select Readings: Intermediate (Lee & Gunderson, 2011). Finally, at the end of the course which lasted two months, the participants sat for their post-test of reading comprehension which was the modified version of pre-test. One-way ANOVA was used to compare the means of the pre-test and the post-test in four groups and Paired Samples t-test was used to compare the pre and post-test of each group. The findings revealed that the reading comprehension of four groups improved and there was a significant difference between the groups concerning reading comprehension post-test. According to the findings of this research, the researcher concluded that monolinguals performed better than the simultaneous bilinguals and also female students were more successful than the male learners. Implications of the study may be useful to teachers and learners who study reading comprehension in bilingual contexts.
KEYWORDS : Reading comprehension, Simultaneous bilingual, Monolingual
