Comparing Data Analysis of a Monolingual and a Bilingual Child

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1, University of Dusseldorf "Heinrich Heine" (Anglistik III), course: Error Analysis, language: English, abstract: Have you ever read a newspaper article about bilingual children? Well, I guess everybody has come across at least one of them. Is it not an interesting matter of fact that bilingual children apparently learn a second language easier than monolingual? But after reading those texts have you ever asked yourself where exactly the differences between monolingual and bilingual children in second language acquisition (SLA) are? I did and therefore I investigated in comparing data of a monolingual and a bilingual child. Consequently in my analysis I will not focus on one particular error but I will take in account all errors made by my subjects. I will start my paper with giving you some background information about the subjects¿ native languages. The monolingual child¿s native language (NL) is German, the bilingual child¿s mother tongues are German and Arabic. I will show you the most important differences between English, German and Arabic. Because I did not find a useful Arabic grammar (in fact the problem was that I can not read Arabic letters) I asked a friend of mine to translate some sentences. Therefore you will find a comparative table of English, German and Arabic in Appendix I. In the next part I will tell you something more about my subjects and about the requirements they had to fulfil. Then I will discribe how I collected the data. The complete data will be found in Appendix II. The next step will be a presentation of my results. First I will tell you how the data was scored. Afterwards there will be a detailed description of each error made by my subjects and I will try to analize why they occured. Finally I will draw a conclusion out of my results.