The Whole Child's Experience? Toward A Transdisciplinary Approach To Understanding Bilingual Development

Fatma F. S. Said, Zayed University

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Journal Of Multilingual Theories And Practices

Publication Date

2-9-2026

Abstract

Multilingual children attain their ability to speak more than one language in diverse ways and due to distinct factors, with some developing their bilingualism faster than their peers (Bialystok, 2002; De Houwer, 2009; Luk & Bialystok, 2013; Nicoladis & Genesee, 1997). In order to capture and understand the disparate ways in which typically developing children become bilinguals and what factors influence diversity in their experience, it is imperative that scholars adopt a transdisciplinary approach (Hoffman et al., 2017; Hult, 2019; Lang et al., 2012; Pohl & Hadorn, 2007; Stokols et al., 2003). The proposal is that an alternate bilingual development framework be formed in which transdisciplinary collaborations between ethnographic longitudinal, descriptive, and experimental cross-sectional approaches are merged, in a bid to understand bilingual development from a more holistic perspective. Data would inform early childhood studies, education policy and support parental efforts to raise bilingual children.

ISSN

2632-4490

Publisher

University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)

Disciplines

Linguistics

Keywords

Arabic-English, transdisciplinary research, early childhood research, socioemotional factors, qualitative-quantitative approaches, bilingual language development

Indexed in Scopus

no

Open Access

yes

Open Access Type

Gold: This publication is openly available in an open access journal/series

Link to Full Text

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