Educational Bilingualism and Language attrition

Abstract

In recent years, a large number of English-language schools have been allowed to be established by the Ministry of Education, and the number is increasing year by year. Though the establishment of such schools was originally meant to be for bilingual education, but teaching of Kurdish in these schools has faced big problems, because Kurdish lessons are not given enough attention and least weekly lessons have been allocated for Kurdish. The researcher aims to show that the language of instruction in schools can have a significant impact on the mother tongue. This shows the role of schools in preserving and reviving Kurdish language. Moreover, the researcher aims to show the differences of Kurdish language attrition between students who study in English and those who study in Kurdish, which is shown by comparing them. The data and the tools used in the study are a questionnaire, which consists of four headings and 25 subheadings. Quantitative method was used to collect the data. After distributing the questionnaire form to the research community and answering the questions of the questionnaire by the participants and receiving the answers, the obtained data were analyzed using each of the statistical rules of Regression and One Way ANOVA. The researcher concluded that schools as non-linguistic basis accounted for 44.6% of mother tongue attrition among the students in the study sample. This is a very high and effective rate. This proves that such schools have not created a balanced language environment for students. This is why there is a big difference in mother tongue attrition between students attending English-medium schools and those attending Kurdish-medium schools.