A survey of research on the acquisition of preliteracy skills in children’s first language (L1) has provided an important starting point from which the unique circumstances of bilingual children can be examined. While there remains a lack of consensus around the exact definition of bilingualism, including that in children, this blog post adopts the term ‘bilingual learner’, deemed as the closest to celebrating learners for their bilingual capacities rather than mainly focusing on their need to learn a second language (see García & Kleifgen, 2018).
This post sheds light on a yet-to-be-investigated aspect of bilingualism: the role that cross-linguistic influence, or typological relatedness, might have in supporting second language (L2) preliteracy acquisition within bilingual learners.
Rather than highlighting our research findings (which we will do in our presentation at BERA’s annual conference in 2023), we want to briefly address an aspect of bilingualism that our study could not investigate because of its nature.
We deem typological relatedness a significant aspect to investigate, especially when a thorough comparative analysis between regional Arabic home languages can be conducted as part of a study’s research methodology. While the nature of our study did not require a comparative analysis, we hope this blog post inspires future relevant studies to examine this aspect, especially regionally.
