A COMPARATIVE RESEARCH OF ACTUAL VOCABULARY OF BILINGUAL AND MONOLINGUAL FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNERS

The paper presents an experimental study of actual English vocabulary of bilingual (native speakers of the Komi-Permyak and Russian languages) and monolingual (native speakers of the Russian language) English learners. The method of actual vocabulary production was used in the research; the experimental data were analyzed with the use of quantitative and qualitative techniques. The results demonstrate that the major difference between actual English vocabularies of bilingual and monolingual learners consists in their size and/or access speed to their units: actual vocabulary of bilinguals reproduced for a limited time period turns out to be less numerous than that of monolingual controls. As for the vocabulary composition structure, it proves to be generally congruent in the repertory of lexical-semantic groups (which correspond to the academic topics studied in the course of classroom English acquisition) and in their nuclear lexis (the core part of each lexical-semantic group reproduced by bilingual and monolingual participants proves extensive overlap). Consequently, it can be supposed that bilingual advantage in foreign language acquisition is not connected with vocabulary size and the richness of its contents, but deperids on some other factors.