Dominant and Balanced Bilinguals: Who Performs Better in English Vocabulary Retention?

Bilinguals and multilinguals are rarely equal in their ability of their two or more languages. Often one of the languages is dominant but it may be changed over time. Most bilinguals will use their two languages for different purposes. while a person being more proficient in one of the two languages (in most cases native-like) is called dominant bilingual, Balanced bilinguals are bilinguals who have equal proficiency in their languages. In the present study the interaction between dominant and balanced bilingualism and general English proficiency test was investigated. To this aim, 134 Iranian female and male high school students of Arak were invited. A general English proficiency test and a bilingual questionnaire were administered to both groups and the Mann-whitney test was used for the analysis of the data. The results indicated that there is no difference between dominant and balanced bilingual learners in English vocabulary retention.