Plurilingual comprehension in young EFL learners: An immediate recall protocol to assess primary school learners’ ability to draw on bilingual context for text comprehension in non-parallel bilingual books

This paper investigates the ability of primary school EFL learners to draw on context in age-appropriate bilingual books. By drawing on context, readers can access the meaning of specific words or phrases, contributing to implicit vocabulary acquisition. This also applies to the reading of bilingual texts, which, at the same time, provide a meaningful context for practicing plurilingual comprehension, i.e. “the practical functional ability to exploit plurilingualism for comprehension” (Council of Europe, 2018, p. 160). For this study, 28 primary school students read a bilingual book that integrates English and English-German bilingual dialogues in a German-language narrative (Ahrens, 2008). Immediate recall interviews were conducted to elicit learners’ ability to use non-target-language context for the comprehension of target-language text. Most students were able to use text sequences in German (school language) to help their comprehension of text passages in English (foreign language), though the ability to identify and use context varied between individuals and between target sentences. The study demonstrates that while drawing on context in bilingual texts is achievable for low beginners, there is evidence that learners would profit from explicit training in plurilingual comprehension.