Advantages of Bilinguals over Monolinguals: Creativity among Bilingual Arabic—Hebrew Arab Students

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between bilingualism and creativity in elementary school students. The main research hypothesis is that bilingual students’ learning ability reflects on creative ability in childhood. The student’s creativity is measured relatively, so when talking about creative students, it is in comparison to monolingual students. The creativity measured in the study is creativity in verbal and visual learning tasks, so there are two forms of creativity in the research. The study focuses on bilingualism among Israeli Arab students because high rates of bilingualism characterize this sector of Israeli society compared to other Israeli students. The way to test research hypotheses is by using the TTCT test, which tests the students’ creativity in several ways, including fluency, flexibility, originality, and speech development. In addition, we examined whether there is a relationship between school type and verbal plot construction, dialogue writing, descriptive ability, and vocabulary ability . The population of the study included a total of 58 children, aged eight years old, selected from two different schools in the southern district of Israel. Thirty students attend a monolingual school(51.7%), and 28 students attend a bilingual school (48.3%). Twenty-one of the students were boys (36.2%), and 37 were girls (63.8%). 50% of the students speak one language, and 50% speak 2 - 3 languages. Also, among 74.1% of students, the mother tongue is Arabic, 20.7% is Hebrew, and 5.1% is Arabic or Hebrew or Russian . The study procedure included children in both groups who did the reading comprehension tests in both languages. According to these tests, we classified the monolingual and bilingual children. The test included various types of questions to test their reading comprehension skills. The children then performed the creative tasks, both in the verbal and visual form of the TTCT tests of creative thinking, measured by the Gilford model . The results of the study show that there are statistically significant differences between bilingual and monolingual students in creativity, in all areas, fluency, flexibility, originality, and speech development. In examining the differences between school types, a significant relationship has been found between the school type and the verbal plot building ability in the TTCT test. Still, no significant relationship was found between the school type and dialogue writing skills, descriptive ability, and vocabulary ability . The study concludes that there is a significant relationship between bilingualism and the level and type of students’ creativity.