The english scanning skills of bilingual and monolingual Indonesian students

Abstract

Studying the reading competence of Indonesian EFL within the framework of bilingualism can be challenging for language researchers. That may be because the area has not yet deeply explored by Indonesian researchers, while Indonesia provides a vast array of data due to its diverse linguistic background. The present small study investigates the English scanning skills of forty-three Indonesian EFL primary level students. Forty nine percent of the subjects are monolinguals, i.e. they use only Indonesian both at home and school. The rest are bilinguals: they use Indonesian and local languages interchangeably at home. The result of the study shows that in general the Indonesian monolinguals have a better performance in comparison to their bilingual counterparts.