TPC Journal-Vol 10- Issue 3-FULL ISSUE

394 The Professional Counselor | Volume 10, Issue 3 Despite the growing number of individuals who speak more than one language, the use of bilingual counseling and its effectiveness are underrepresented in the current literature (Ali, 2004; Ivers & Villalba, 2015; Santiago-Rivera & Altarriba, 2002; Softas-Nall et al., 2015). Gallardo-Cooper (2008) defined bilingual counseling as “therapeutic discourse that accommodates the client’s linguistic characteristics and incorporates bilingual or multilingual factors as vital components of psychological and contextual functioning” (p. 1022). In 2004, Fuertes published a review of the existing literature on this topic and conceptualized bilingual counseling as “a special form of counseling” (p. 85). Fuertes’ review underscored the need for more studies in this area, stating that “there has been a dearth of conceptual and empirical literature on the topic of bilingual counseling and virtually no conceptual or empirical research on the topic of bilingual supervision” (p. 84). Moreover, coming to a consensus on what is bilingual can be difficult because different dimensions (e.g., reading, writing, speaking) need to be assessed to determine a person’s language proficiency (Santiago-Rivera & Altarriba, 2002). To gain a more accurate understanding of the current practice of bilingual counseling, its effectiveness, and related training and supervision, a systematic review of the literature published in the past two decades was conducted in this study. Method Two counselor educators formed a research team for this study. The team used the work of Edwards and Pedrotti (2008) as a guide for developing the steps to conduct a comprehensive search of relevant articles. First, several keywords were identified with the intent to identify journal articles that paid particular attention to bilingual counseling. The keywords included counseling, counselling, therapy, and psychotherapy combined with the words bilingual , multilingual, bi-lingual, and multi-lingual (e.g., bilingual counseling , multilingual counselling , bilingual therapy , multilingual psychotherapy ) . Additionally, the keywords bilingual client , bi-lingual client , multilingual client , and multi-lingual client were included to conduct searches as thoroughly as possible. Each team member independently ran multiple searches on major online databases (e.g., PsycINFO, ERIC, PsycARTICLES) by using the keywords to locate as many peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2000 and 2019 as possible. Collectively, the searches generated over 750 hits. Second, the abstracts of the articles from our respective searches were reviewed to determine whether they specifically focused on bilingual counseling. Third, the results from the two independent reviews were compiled into a list of potential articles for a final review. Forty articles were selected for this final review process. Upon the review of all 40 abstracts and discussion on the applicability of each article for this study, it was determined that 22 articles addressed the practice of bilingual counseling as the primary content. Of these articles, seven of them were removed from the list because they did not offer findings from an original study. Hence, the remaining 15 articles were included in this systematic review (see Table 1). Results The selected articles provided insights into the experiences of clients and/or counselors in bilingual counseling settings, including interpreter-mediated sessions. Additionally, a few articles (Ivers & Villalba, 2015; Mirza et al., 2017; Trepal et al., 2014) discussed experiences of graduate counseling and psychology students and their perceived cultural competency. The present review is organized into three areas: client perspectives, counselor perspectives, and training and supervision. Some of the articles are included in two sections (e.g., counselor perspectives and training and supervision) because the study findings covered more than one aspect of bilingual counseling.