The Whole Child's Experience? Toward a Transdisciplinary Approach to Understanding Bilingual Development

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.