A Parents' and Teachers' Guide to Bilingualism

by Colin Baker

Written in a very reader-friendly style, the book is a practical introduction for parents and teachers to bilingualism. Straightforward and realistic answers are given to a comprehensive set of frequently asked questions about bilingualism and bilingual education. Areas covered include family, language, culture, identity, reading, writing, schooling and issues.

In the third edition, there is new or more detailed consideration of:

Moving between countries, cultural adaptation

Identity issues

One parent - one language (OPOL) families

Pre schools / kindergartens / nursery schools

Helping with homework

Dyslexia

Language scaffolding

Multilingualism and trilingualism; trilingual families

Adoption

WWW links, articles and books for further reading

Genres: Parenting, Education, Nonfiction, Reference

256 pages, Paperback

First published May 28, 1995

Reviews

[Mirela · Rating 1 out of 5]

That was hard read. I feel this is a book mostly for English speakers in the USA. Here in Europe (at least two countries known to me,  Croatia and Finland),  things with bilingualism and multilingualism are so normal. It is common thing to be "fluentish" in at least 3 languages. Even my grandparents used 2 languages on a regular basis. There are no fears and concerns about that being a bad thing ( which is discussed in 200 pages 🙄). So it was a weird experience for me as a European reading this book. Awkward read.

[Taren · Rating 2 out of 5]

Random bold words and constant 'examples' were really annoying. Anyone reading this knows what bilingualism is. You don't have to say 'a child learning English and French might...' or 'Children who speak a minority language at home (for example, Spanish)..' made this unbearable to read. Not much useful information if you've read ANY other book on the topic. Otherwise I suppose it's a good introduction. The Q&A format is kind of weird though and makes the book very redundant.

[Sonia Mileva · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much repetitions - everything could be written in 50 pages instead of 200. Also the content was totally useless - most of the sections being just enumeration.

[Meghan Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult to rate, as it was extremely dry reading. I did gain some insights and takeaways. The author does a lot of talking about the ‘prestige’ of languages in a particular community as well as stigmas of being bilingual that struck me as quite odd. I’ve always seen being multilingual as an achievement to be proud of as a citizen of the world, so it was interesting to see the author’s perspective, especially as it’s not American. I’m worried about being a poor language model to our kiddo, as I’m not a heritage speaker of Spanish (which is the second language I want our child to grow up with). Our situation seems to be a minority of what the book was focused on, but I still found valuable information.

[jcka Lee · Rating 1 out of 5]

Skimmed through it, it’s not for my situation and didn’t provide any insights. While I understand it can’t cover every situation, and it did make a sad attempt to be “global” with some examples of EU case studies, the view points seems a bit narrow minded and very heavily (North) American focused. Not a fan of terms such as “prestigious languages” when referring to English. A lot of sections I found slightly offensive?
The good thing is the structure of the book makes it easy to skim and stop at sections that may be of interest.

[Nadine · Rating 3 out of 5]

I understand the rationale of having the book structured as a Q&A but in doing so some of the strength of the message gets lost / diluted.
The truth is that true bilingualism takes a lot of effort - and much of that needs to occur in the primary years and the hard bits are the literacy - especially writing. Further it takes a clear understanding of Jos to set your goals and plan to achieve them.
You need to do a lot of reading around the book to get that.

[Kaylee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great resources for people who have so many questions about how, when, and what to do when faced with the question. Does your child speak both languages? I can now confidently answer that question and not feel like I am failing for not starting right away and that as long as I do teach him that everything will turn out okay. This book has answered a lot of questions for me regarding my decision and plan to teach my child my mother tongue.

[Nicholas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good basic guide that answers questions about bilingualism and bilingual education in an accessible format and language.

[Wendel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book mainly addresses the question whether or not children from 'third-world' immigrants should first learn to speak and read their parents language. The text is not particularly helpful for parents in a mixed marriage, interested, like me, in raising their children bilingual from a very early age

It is clear that raising a bilingual child needs a strategy and special attention must be given to the weaker language (weaker in influence in a given situation). Therefore, the author argues, children of minorities should first learn their parents language.Teaching the majority language must not start before primary school. No pre-school activities in the majority language. Reading should first be learned in the minority language, secondary schools must also use the minority language. This strategy is thought to serve both the interests of the child and those of traditional cultures.

Colin Baker is, I believe, an authority in his field, but I'm afraid his argument failed to convince me. That has a lot to do with the radicalism with which it is presented. Not a single counterargument is taken seriously and the author has some weird opinions outside his field of competence (e.g. racism as a speciality of the west, the idea that language never was a factor in the outbreak of war, monolinguists as muggles). I also find it very difficult to embrace his implicit ideal of multicultural segregation (the Lebanon model).

Finally, my appreciation of this book was lessened by the author's inhibition to call problems by their name, which made the reading unnecessary difficult, and the repetious style, which made it a bit boring.

[Ty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three examples of teaching strategies that can be used by parents
1. develop a 'sight' vocabulary first
2. get your child to talk about an experience. one or more short sentences (or later, a story) is written down on a card. A copy of the sentence is cut up and reconstructed by the child
3. children are given a story (esp. to do with their own experience or something from their parent's past) with words missing. They are asked to guess the missing words and write them in the text. This encourages comprehension and reading independence.

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is structured in questions and answers so it's quite easy to browse to the topics that actually apply to your family situation. The sections about family and development are useful for any language combination at home but I felt that the sections about education were very focused on situations in which English is one of the languages at home or in the society, thus it was quite useless for us.

[Judit Gueta · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writer repeats himself a lot, and for relatively special cases as ours (my mother tongue is a minority language with almost no other speakers around, and my husband does not speak it) there isn't too much practical information after the first (two) chapters. Those two chapters are pretty good though.

[GONZA · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is always better to read this book again because Tommaso is growing up and we are considering whether to send him to a bilingual school.

È sempre meglio ripassare considerando che Tommaso sta crescendo e stiamo valutando se mandarlo ad una scuola bilingue.

[Cait Webster · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice overall

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good intro to multilingualism.

[Susanna]

think I ordered this from amazon.fr last year