Woordverwerving Door Eentalige en Tweetalige Kinderen bu Engels in Het Basisonderwijs

Since 1985 English has been an obligatory subject in the last two classes of Dutch primary schools. This fact provided an inducement to carry out an investigation to examine if balanced bilingual Turkish and Moroccan children would react differently from Dutch monolingual children to these English classes. Surprisingly research into third language learning appears to be very rare and seems to indicate on the one hand that bilingualism is not always an advantage. On the other hand research on cognitive and metalinguistic abilities of bilingual children suggests that bilinguals may benefit from having this specific learning experience. This research therefore aimed at testing the hypothesis that bilinguals would learn a third language in a different and more efficient way than monolinguals with the same IQ-level and socio-economic status. In this article a word production and a word comprehension test are discussed, which were administered to the subjects' groups after two years of learning English. The selection of subjects, a lexical analysis of textbooks and the test construction are described. The results of the two tests do not show any differences between mono- and bilinguals, which means that, with regard to vocabulary acquisition, bilingualism does not have a positive influence on learning a new language. The results of other tests (grammatical judgements, spontaneous production and word recognition) will show if this finding can be generalized to other skills.