A Parents' and Teachers' Guide to Bilingualism

The book contains a lot of information about various aspects of raising bilingual children. However, like pretty much everything I've read about bilingualism, this book suffers from not being objective. It seems that all existing material about bilingualism has an agenda to push: bilingualism is good. This bias made the book annoying to me. Now, don't get me wrong: I am a big supporter of multilingualism. I enjoy learning languages myself and I am doing my best to raise my daughter to be trilingual. I strongly believe that knowing more languages makes your life richer in many ways. But it is irritating to read all those books and articles that brush aside obvious problems that come with multilingualism in the effort to promote it. I started the review by saying that l like this book overall and this is for one reason: it made me think more concretely about what a measure of success in being multilingual is (more about it below). THE BIAS The basic premise that I have a problem with is repeated throughout the book. Here's one example [from section E26]: "Languages don't exist in balance: the higher the one, the lower the other". This is obviously not true at many levels. Let's first consider pure language competence in the sense of how large one's vocabulary is. We learn language from many sources but for simplicity, let's focus on reading books. There's a finite number of books I can read in a given period of time. Say, I can read 100 books in some amount of time. If I read all 100 in one language, I will acquire a better vocabulary in this language than if I read 50 books in this language and 50 in another. I think that the basic disagreement between me and the author of the book is that he is happy if an individual acquires just a basic command of language you need in your everyday life: to connect with your community, have a conversation with a stranger etc. What we're losing is the extra difference between a person with average competency in a language and someone who truly mastered it. I don't think that the trade-off is always obvious. And what's more, using language is not just about the vocabulary size. Using the language means living the culture of this language. So the vocabulary size is just one of the aspects where there will be a gap between a multilingual who knows a given language as one of a few languages and a monolingual who knows the culture related to that language in a more comprehensive way. The monolingual will have read more books, listened to more songs, watched more movies, used more web sites, talked to more friends, played more games etc in a given language than a person who lived the life of that language only part-time. Whether this is better or worse is a matter of your point of view and your values. I happen to think that even if I know fewer artifacts of a given culture, the fact that I can look at the culture both from the inside and from a perspective of another culture makes me understand this culture better

If you're thinking about raising your child to be bilingual, this is the book to get. There's actually not much else out there currently. It's a little theoretical and not very practical in terms of day to day operation, but it's a great place to start in making a family language learning plan.

Colin Baker's handbook is a help for which bilingual parents have waited for too long a time. In this new edition, Baker includes the most recent research results in a format which allows perpetually busy parents to read according to their current perception of their individual set of language parenting problems. Nearly anything that can go right or wrong is treated somewhere in the course of these myriad questions. For ready reference, the questions are listed in the table of contents.What tends to happen to the reader is, however, the following: You begin by looking up "your" question and read the very readable answers Baker offers - and just do not stop there. Suddenly you realize that there are many thousands of other parents with concerns much like your own, who are also asking interesting questions - and the television stays turned off for the rest of the evening.We have bought this book for the reference of the parents and teachers in our International School. Because bilingual and multilingual children are not simply monolingual children with two or more languages at their disposal, raising them means adjusting to a different mode of thinking. For monolingual parents and teachers this means learning that such children will experience specific phases in their development, encounter specific advantages and disadvantages in their learning progress, which the monolingual adults did not experience in this way. Parents and teachers must learn to monitor the advancement of their children's learning in a manner congruent with an unfamiliar, but not threatening, reality. Colin Baker's book is one of the best works for teachers and parents who want to be able to assist bilingual and multilingual children in making the best possible use of their developmental opportunities.

This is a great book that is exactly as the title says, a parent and teachers guide to bilingualism. It is set up in a Q & A format where every question you had about bilingualism answered from "My child refuses to use one of his/her languages. What should I do?" to "My child stutters. Is this caused by bilingualism." I work with a lot of bilingual families and I will be recommending this book a lot as it is fact- and research-based, yet written for lay people.