Educational Problems of Bilinguals in Elementary Levels

Abstract

Differences between morphological and syntactic structure of Arabic language on one side and Persian language on the other, is a significant factor causing problems in speaking, reading and writing skills of Persian at elementary level in bilingual areas, in the south of Iran, where Arabic speaking children are supposed to learn Persian at school The participant samples of this study comprise 60 teachers and students of 6 classes of the schools in these Arabic speaking areas. The samples were chosen by an accidental multistage cluster sampling. All the students of the sample were Arab bilinguals living in the south of Iran, Khuzestan Province. The data were gathered through teacher and student questionnaires. 5 Persian- speaking monolingual students were chosen by the same sampling method as the control group and they were interviewed by the same questionnaires. Descriptive statistical method, including percentage, frequency, and average, were used to analyze the quantitative data; then the quantitative and the qualitative data obtained were analyzed. The findings show that the most frequent morphological problems of these learners are in verbal inflections (mode, tense, number …) and subject-verb agreement. They have non-linguistic problems who reinforces language problems too.