Abstract
This paper focuses on predicting academic success among monolingual and bilingual psychology students graduating from an American university in South Florida. Monolingual students were found to be reliably better in receptive vocabulary, reading comprehension and writing fluency than their bilingual peers. Monolingual and bilingual students were equivalent, however, in grammar awareness, phonological awareness, expressive vocabulary, vocabulary density and writing quality. The best predictors of reading comprehension skill among monolingual students were grammar awareness, and both receptive and expressive vocabulary. No measures were reliable predictors of bilingual skill. This paper includes a discussion of the work-related behaviours likely to be influenced by these cognitive skills and promotes the use of multiple indicators of success needed to predict academic and career-related outcomes. Finally, implications for the training and preparation of bilingual, non-native speakers of English, as well as monolingual speakers, are outlined.