Differences between monolingual and bilingual students

University of Quindío
Modern Languages Program
Calderon
Carolina Betancourt Ruiz
November 11th, 2010

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MONOLINGUAL AND BILINGUAL
STUDENTS IN WRITTEN COMPREHENSION
OF THEMOTHER TONGUE

Education which is a desire for knowledge is essential for all human beings in this entire world. Every day people want to achieve the goal of getting more knowledge to beeducated, therefore, the most important tool for this is to use communication as a way of sharing some aspect like customs, feelings, beliefs and opinions. Here in Colombia, there are monolingual andbilingual schools where the mother tongue plays an important role to communicate the aspects mentioned before. Monolinguism is the capacity to speak, to write and to understand meanings in the nativelanguage while bilingualism is the capacity not only to comprehend but also to express perfectly oral and written messages in the first and second language. According to Angela Maria Morales, Monolingualand bilingual students are compared in their mother tongue to analyze their level in reading comprehension more than written production.

Reading comprehension is the ability that human beingshave to understand the meaning of a text, article or story. Each individual should practice some strategies of lecture; fast or attentive lectures between others; in order to understand the realmeaning of a lecture. Morales states that the central objective of this research is to compare monolingual with bilingual children in reading comprehension of their mother tongue. What the study showed wasthat monolingual students of third grade manifested a retard in reading comprehension of the target language whereas bilinguals of the same grade exceeded monolinguals in this aspect of knowledge.In addition, this research made by Morales demonstrated that monolinguals of fifth grade went beyond bilinguals of the same grade in reading comprehension.

On the other hand, written...