Are They Shaving, Cutting or Shearing the Sheep? A Comparison between the English Lexicon and Pronunciation of Students in Monolingual and Bilingual Education in the Netherlands

In this research the English proficiency of two groups of students who attended the same secondary school in the Netherlands are compared. The first group of students followed a monolingual pre-university programme, while the other group attended a bilingual preuniversity stream. After an explanation about the differences between these two programmes and an exploration of earlier research into pronunciation and vocabulary acquisition, this study examined what the differences/similarities were between these two groups in terms of oral proficiency after five years of secondary education. Twenty students, ten of each programme, were asked to complete two tasks. For the first task they were asked to read out a text, and afterwards their pronunciation of pre-selected vowels and consonants was analyzed with the speech analysis program Praat. The second task required the students to first describe a painting by Breughel in their own words and then to describe five specific scenes on the...Show moreIn this research the English proficiency of two groups of students who attended the same secondary school in the Netherlands are compared. The first group of students followed a monolingual pre-university programme, while the other group attended a bilingual preuniversity stream. After an explanation about the differences between these two programmes and an exploration of earlier research into pronunciation and vocabulary acquisition, this study examined what the differences/similarities were between these two groups in terms of oral proficiency after five years of secondary education. Twenty students, ten of each programme, were asked to complete two tasks. For the first task they were asked to read out a text, and afterwards their pronunciation of pre-selected vowels and consonants was analyzed with the speech analysis program Praat. The second task required the students to first describe a painting by Breughel in their own words and then to describe five specific scenes on the painting. The results showed that there were slight differences between the oral proficiencies of monolingual and bilingual students and that both groups of students had not acquired a set of characteristics that all of them adhered to in terms of vowel and consonant pronunciation. A lot of variation existed between the two groups, even though the agreement was stronger in the bilingual group. When comparing both groups’ lexicon quantitatively, the bilingual group clearly expressed themselves more extensively in their second language than the monolingual group, but qualitatively speaking the bilingual students did not appear to be familiar with more lower-frequency words than the monolingual students.Show less

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Are They Shaving, Cutting or Shearing the Sheep? A Comparison between the English Lexicon and Pronunciation of Students in Monolingual and Bilingual Education in the Netherlands