Comparing the Performance of Iranian bilingual EFL Students with Monolingual Groups by means of the Treatment of the Etymology of Unknown English Words upon Their Vocabulary Retention

Mastering vocabulary knowledge has always been a major concern for language learners (Nation, 2002). The present research mainly concerned with the impression comparing the performance of Iranian bilingual EFL students with monolingual groups by means of the treatment of the etymology of unknown English words upon their vocabulary retention. The ongoing research aimed at exploring the significant difference between the performance of bilingual and monolingual Iranian EFL learners in learning vocabulary through etymology strategy of unknown words as a trend. To do this, 60 students in third and fourth grades in senior high school, were randomly selected out of 100 male students from the schools of Mahshahr, in Khouzestan province, Iran. Thirty two of them were Arabic-Persian bilinguals (APBs) who were put in group A and 28 were Persian monolinguals (PMs) in group B. Students in group A were mostly studying Persian and English at school and their communication was in Arabic. Their age range was from 17 to 18. A background questionnaire and a list of their scores in the last semester were prepared in order to find personal information and determine the homogeneity of the participants; a PET test was given to them to ensure the level of their English proficiency. The PET questions involved three parts: reading and writing, listening and speaking .To find out the impact of etymology of unknown English words, a researcher made questionnaire which contains 15originallyArabic words and15originallyPersianwordswere taken. Based on the research questions, the following basic hypothesis was generated: The etymology of unknown English words has a significant impact upon Iranian English foreign learners’ vocabulary retention. The results of the study manifested that those receiving treatment in the bilingual group outshone those in the monolingual group.