TPC Journal-Vol 10- Issue 3-FULL ISSUE

The Professional Counselor | Volume 10, Issue 3 403 linguistically diverse clients, it seems imperative to provide appropriate supervision and additional support to those who are expected to provide bilingual counseling services during their clinical experiences. For example, the participants in Trepal et al.’s study recommended that programs assist bilingual students in forming a peer support group that allows exchange of information on bilingual counseling and promotes bilingualism. The participants in Johal’s study (2017) made an essential point; that is, it should not be assumed that bilingual counselors know how to provide counseling in more than one language simply because they speak the language. Developing training programs that prepare students to work with bilingual clients (Costa & Dewaele, 2014; Santiago-Rivera & Altarriba, 2002) as well as increasing the number of bilingual counselors (Ivers & Villalba, 2015) are therefore critical steps to serving linguistically diverse client populations. Four of the 15 articles reviewed for this study (Ivers & Villalba, 2015; Johal, 2017; Trepal et al., 2014; Vaquero & Williams, 2019) offered one common suggestion for counseling training programs. All spoke of the importance of providing additional training that increases awareness in culture and language. Several scholars whose studies focused on supporting the Latinx population offered helpful recommendations for graduate counselor education and training programs, including: (a) integrating a community-engagement and collaboration component into the training curriculum (Smith-Adcock et al., 2006); (b) creating opportunities for cultural immersion experiences (Ivers & Villalba, 2015); (c) offering courses in both English and Spanish (Ramos-Sánchez, 2007); (d) delivering some content (e.g., diagnostic terms) in Spanish (Vaquero & Williams, 2019); and (e) developing standards for evaluating counselor competency in providing bilingual counseling (Verdinelli & Biever, 2009). Additionally, training programs should emphasize the significance of understanding history, nationality, culture, community, and geographic settings (e.g., living in an urban vs. rural community) of linguistically diverse clients (Vaquero & Williams, 2019). These recommendations may be applicable and helpful to counselor education programs that are committed to preparing students for providing bilingual counseling services to meet the needs of their local communities. Furthermore, some counselors may have an opportunity to offer counseling services to clients in collaboration with an interpreter. It is essential that specialized training is available to counselors and interpreters who are interested in joining forces to serve clients within the context of mental health service delivery. Such training curricula should address the effectiveness of evidence-based approaches to providing interpreter-mediated counseling services (Mirza et al., 2017). Conclusion and Future Research Scholars who have written about the current practice of bilingual counseling encourage researchers to explore the following areas in future studies: (a) associations between counselor language proficiency and clients’ perceptions of counselors and counseling relationships (Ramos-Sánchez, 2009; Trepal et al., 2014; Verdinelli & Biever, 2009); (b) actual clients’ experiences of mental health services (Johal, 2017; Ramos-Sánchez, 2009); (c) effectiveness, roles, and use of language switching in counseling (Costa & Dewaele, 2014; Pérez Rojas et al., 2014; Ramos-Sánchez, 2007, 2009; Santiago-Rivera &Altarriba, 2002; Vaquero &Williams, 2019); (d) relationships between counselors’ bilingualism and their multicultural counseling competency by combining self-reports and external observations (Ivers & Villalba, 2015); and (e) efficacy of bilingual supervision and training models on bilingual counseling (Trepal et al., 2014). The purpose of this study was to gain a more accurate understanding of the practice of bilingual counseling, its effectiveness, and related training and supervision by conducting a systematic review of the literature published over the past two decades. It is important to note that the search results for this present review were limited by the selected keywords and available databases. In addition, some of the