Leveraging Primary-School Bilingual Students’ Linguistic Repertoires to Foster Morphological Awareness and Reading Comprehension

In multilingual contexts such as the Basque Autonomous Community, fostering cross-linguistic awareness is essential to support literacy development and overall academic achievement. This study investigates a pedagogical intervention aimed at developing morphological awareness as a foundation for cross-linguistic reflection to enhance reading comprehension. A quasi-experimental design was implemented in a trilingual school with 70 sixth-grade students who were assigned to an experimental group (n = 24) or a control group (n = 46). Over a six-week period, the experimental group received explicit morphological instruction in the curricular languages—Basque, Spanish, and English. Morphological awareness and reading comprehension were assessed in all three languages. Although no statistically significant improvements were observed in reading comprehension, the experimental group demonstrated significantly greater gains in morphological awareness across the three languages. In addition, out-of-school exposure to Basque was positively associated with both morphological awareness and reading comprehension, highlighting the role of linguistic input. A strong association was also found between morphological awareness and reading comprehension, supporting the interdependence of these skills. Overall, the findings underscore the potential of pedagogical translanguaging to foster metalinguistic awareness across languages in multilingual educational contexts.