A comparative study of monolinguals and multilinguals in the EFL context

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the differences between monolingual and bilingual speakers in the process of acquiring the English passive in order to find out which group of informants has an advantage. This smallscale research begins with a hypothesis that bilinguals will have better results due to the fact that they already speak two languages, which gives them an advantage over monolinguals. The research includes 60 informants from the University of Novi Sad, Serbia, who speak only Serbian, only Hungarian or both languages. They filled out a questionnaire and the data was analyzed quantitatively in order to compare the three groups of informants. Considering all the factors and results, it can be concluded that bilingual speakers do have a certain advantage over their monolingual peers, but this advantage is not significant so more testing should be done with a larger sample.