The thesis aimed firstly to assess the Persian language proficiency and academic achievement of some bilingual Turkish-Persian speakers and their monolingual Persian-speaking counterparts and secondly to examine the relationship between this language proficiency and educational achievement. The study involves 60 children: 30 bilingual (15 male and 15 female) and 30 monolinguals (15 male and 15 female). The subjects are third, fourth, and fifth grade students in two primary schools in Quchan, a town in north-east Iran.
A short, wordless picture book known as 'the frog story' and a conversation were used for assessing subjects' language proficiency. Their end-of-year class reports were also used as the basis for assessing their academic achievement. Meanwhile, bilingual subjects were given a questionnaire so that they would provide the researcher with some more information about their language backgrounds. As the final stage, a comparison was made between monolinguals'
language proficiency and their academic achievement and those of their bilingual peers to see whether there is a correlation between these two.
The patterns of results between the groups differed according to the measure being examined. For the Language Proficiency scores there were main effects of Lingualism (monolingual versus bilingual) and Gender, with an interaction of
Gender X Lingualism X Grade. There were Lingualism effects showing higher scores on Language Proficiency for monolinguals. There were also Gender effects showing higher scores on Language Proficiency for female students. There was a
moderate correlation between subjects' Language Proficiency scores and their School Average Scores: the groups with higher mean Language Proficiency score had higher mean School Average Scores. The correlation, however, was stronger
among male subjects. Bilingual children also showed a much stronger correlation than their monolingual peers in this concern. There were also Grade effects on the correlation between subjects' Language Proficiency scores and their School
Average Scores. The correlation for 3rd graders was stronger than that of for 4th graders, and the correlation for 4th graders was stronger than that of for 5th graders.
With regards to Frog Story, the correlation between the Narrative Total score and the Language Proficiency score was almost the same for monolingual and bilingual subjects. The correlation, however, was slightly stronger for female subjects than for their male peers. When the Narrative Total score was broken down into its component scores, i.e. Narrative Style and Grammatical Accuracy, monolingual-bilingual differences were quite small for Grammatical Accuracy
scores, but the differences were larger for the narrative elements, as recorded in Narrative Style scores.
In general, the results show the complexity and multi-faceted nature of language proficiency and its relation to academic achievement. With regards to the hypotheses stated, both HI and H2 were supported by the data. Additionally,
the effects of two other factors, i.e. grade and gender on the subjects' language proficiency were investigated.