Abstract:

In today’s globalised world, the knowledge of foreign languages and cultures has become an inevitable part of people’s lives. Therefore, new methods and approaches to foreign language teaching are being implemented into the educational process. In Slovakia, bilingual education is currently becoming more and more popular. The proponents of this approach point out to the fact that foreign languages are taught in a more natural way. Instead of focusing on the language itself, the language is used as a means for obtaining new information. This perfectly fits into the concept of Morrow’s (1991) communicative methodology, which includes an information gap, a choice of the language user how they want to use the language, and the existence of feedback. This natural way of language learning should result in students achieving a higher language competence.

In our study, the impact of bilingual education on reading skills is evaluated, comparing the reading skills of secondary school students working on their B2 level in both bilingual and non-bilingual study programme. In their English lessons, both groups of students use the same coursebook. However, the students in the bilingual programme study geography, history and English literature in the English language. Therefore, we supposed that their ability to work with texts including specific terminology should be higher. The analysis is based on two didactic tests. One test consisted of two texts from the field of geography. The first text was followed by two sets of questions – matching (6 items) and gap filling (7 items). The second test was followed by a set of multiple-choice questions (6 items). The other test consisted of three texts written in general English on the B2 level not including any geographical terms. Each text was followed by questions based on a different testing technique – matching (7 items), dichotomous task – true/ false (6 items) and gap filling (7 items).

The analysis showed that there is no significant difference when it comes to understanding a general text. While the bilingual students achieved the average score 87.69%, the non-bilingual students achieved the average score 87.14%. Having said that, there was a considerable difference when it comes to understanding the texts from the field of geography. The bilingual students achieved the average score 87.49%, while the non-bilingual students just 57.14%. The results of the didactic tests clearly show that the students of the bilingual study programme can understand texts with specific terminology better than the students of the non-bilingual study programme. In order to enhance the reading skills of non-bilingual study programmes’ students, we suggest research on implementation of the CLIL methodology into non-bilingual study programmes be carried out.

Keywords:

Bilingual education, bilingual geography, reading comprehension.