The Evaluation of Monolingual and Bilingual Students’ Writing Skills in Fifth Grade of Secondary School Comparatively

Abstract

This study was conducted to determine the writing skills of bilingual students whose mother tongue is Kurdish and monoligual students whose mother tongue is Turkish in the fifth grade of secondary school. More specifically, the story and essay writing skills of bilingual students are compared with the writing skills of monolingual students based on their reading habits and their parents’ educational backgrounds. The research is a descriptive study based on scanning model and aims to reveal the current situation as it is. The study group of the research consists of a total of 104 fifth grade secondary school students, 52 bilingual and 52 monolingual, studying in 4 different secondary schools in the central district of İpekyolu in Van, Turkey. In order to determine students’ writing skills, stories and essays were written to them at different times in one lesson hour (average forty minutes). The stories were evaluated according to the Story Writing Evaluation Form (İzdeş, 2011). The essays were evaluated according to the Written Expression Rating Scale (Deniz, 2003). According to the results of Mann Whitney-U and Kruskal - Wallis-H tests, monolingual students outperformed bilingual students in both story and essay writing. While a significant difference was found between bilingual and monolingual students’ essay and story writing skills, no significant difference was found in terms of parents› education status or the number of books their parents read. The findings have interesting implications for the researchers and teachers in the area.