A comparative Study of Iranian EFL Monolinguals and Bilinguals in terms of Attitude, Motivation, Test Anxiety, and Language Achievement

In today’s world learning a second language, especially English, has become vital for success, both academically and professionally. Many factors contribute to students’ academic achievements. This study was carried out to determine whether there is a difference in test anxiety, attitude, intrinsic and instrumental motivation of the monolingual and bilingual university students in English. To this end, 250 freshman university students majoring in various fields from three universities were randomly selected. A questionnaire was administered to 125 bilingual students at the University of Payame Noor and Islamic Azad University of Meshkin Shahr. The same questionnaire was administered to 125 monolingual students at the Payame Noor University of Qazvin in Iran. Due to 23 of the questionnaires being incomplete, only 227 of them were selected and analyzed. To compare these two groups’ attitude, instrumental and intrinsic motivations and test anxiety, independent samples t-test was used. It was found out that the bilingual students had a more positive attitude towards learning English than the mono-lingual ones. Furthermore, the bilingual group showed a higher intrinsic motivation towards learning English than did the mono-lingual ones. However, no significant difference was observed among them with respect to their instrumental motivation. In addition, while the general English grades of the bilingual students were significantly higher than those of the mono-lingual ones, they showed no significant difference in their test anxiety. It is hoped that the educational curriculum planners in Iran could benefit from this study and design a curriculum which is suitable for both bilingual and monolingual Iranian English language learners.