Supporting the development of the bilingual lexicon through translanguaging: a realist review integrating psycholinguistics with educational sciences

Abstract

In this review, we evaluate the claim that translanguaging in the classroom supports the development of the bilingual lexicon by enhancing cross-linguistic transfer. To address this issue, we integrate findings from psycholinguistics and educational sciences in order to identify how effective pedagogical practices for monolingual children can be extended to pedagogical practices for bilingual children. We show that both monolingual and bilingual children benefit from teaching strategies that strengthen the mental connections between semantically and phonologically related words, and that for bilingual children, these strategies should support both within- and cross-language connections. We argue that by stimulating the use of the home language in the classroom, translanguaging strategies like multilingual label quests and multilingual reading and writing can strengthen cross-language connections and, thereby, facilitate cross-linguistic lexical transfer. For closely related languages, stimulation of the home language has the additional benefit of implicitly facilitating the transfer of cognate vocabulary. Explicit instruction about cognates could further stimulate the development of cognate awareness, but whether it also enhances vocabulary learning is still an open question.