Comparison between Working Memory and Academic Performance in Bilingual and Monolingual Boy Students

This study aimes to compare working memory and academic performance in bilingual and monolingual boy students in grade five at primary schools. 89 boy student (47 monolingual and 42 bilingual) in Shahreyar (Alborz provience) in 2011- 2012 academic year were chosen randomly by multi-stage sampling method and the Cornoldi Working Memory Test was conducted on them. Their Farsi literature grade was extracted from their transcript of grades. Results showed that the average of the Cornoldi Working Memory Test in bilingual students was significantly higher than the monolinguals. But in Farsi literature، bilinguals were meaningfully lower. Bilingual students working memory performance were meaningfully higher than the monolinguals، while their average performance in Farsi literature was lower than the monolinguals