Customer Reviews

A Parents' and Teachers' Guide to Bilingualism (Parents' and Teachers' Guides, 1)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

The author clearly knows his stuff, but is guilty of making a book out of the following contents

- Favour using your native language with the child if you speak other languages weakly

- One parent one language, avoid mixing two languages in the same context

- It's mostly not true that bi- and multilingual children get "confused"

- If your children have problems, it's probably not bilingualism's fault

- Use common sense

- Aren't my analogies beautiful?

- Use some more common sense

Now copy and paste this 2000 times and there you have the book.

After reading an excerpt via the "look inside" feature Amazon offers, I decided to give this book a try. As a parent debating whether to send her child to a dual language program (yes, there are different bilingual programs..read to find out!), this book answered many if not all of my questions. I liked the Q & A format, and found it easy to read (especially when time is limited with two young children). There isn't a lot of information out there about the effects of bilingual education on language majority children, and this is one book I found that addressed this. I was particularly concerned about my child's reading development (or lack of) if first taught in a language other than our own. The book did address this issue, and I've never found another that does! All parents want their child to succeed, so it is important for a book for parents to address issues such as this.

It's true the book is repetitive in some areas, but I believe this is due to the format. A reader might look up an answer to one question, but not bother to read the book straight through.

A few criticisms: It is a little slanted towards European language development. However, it appears that this is the author's area of expertise. I also would have liked to have citations to references. "Research shows..." is not enough information for me! Where did Mr. Baker get this information? I'm comforted that he does seem to be an expert in this field, as he has written textbooks on bilingual theory, but still...parents want references too!

For a parent who wants to know more about bilingual education and how it will affect their child's development, this is a good read. Overall, I found the advice sound and useful.

As written in several reviews there are lots of repetitions, and that might be because the book is written as a collection of questions and answers. Nevertheless one advantage of the book is to obtain a fast answer to some questions related to raising a bilingual child, like what type of schools are available. I have three main issues with this book.

1) the author or editor likes to write some WORDS in bold (i put here the EQUIVALENT in large caps). This IS extremely disturbing because it seems that the READER is considered as an idiot. Also THERE seems to be no real logic in terms of what words are bolded or not. It is the first time I see a book EDITED like that, and I hope the last time.

2) The book is written in the not-that-sharp-academic style. In other words many answers are a collection of facts and possibilities, without real insight about what to chose or what influence a decision will have on your child future.

3) The author bases lots of statements on her proudly raising three bilingual children in Welsh and English. These two languages belong however to the same family of indo-european languages. Some of the advice of the author are therefore questionable regarding bilingualism involving very different languages (for us, mandarin and french). Furthermore, the author differentiates all along the book between high-profile languages (French, English, German) and minority or lower level languages like Spanish or Asian languages. The former languages should benefit your children while the latter ones are not so interesting. The book does not say it so plainy, but there is a rassistic tone, eurocentric, that I profundly dislike.

This book confirms and repeats, over and over again, that bilingualism is a good thing, that there are no disadvantages to bilingualism, and that young children are, for the most part, good at learning languages. This should allay any unfounded fears parents may have that bilingualism might not be a good idea. The poor side of the book is that it can essentially be condensed into the above review. There is little or no practical advice on how parents can best bring up a baby to be bilingual short of those methods obvious to most people (e.g. "talk to your child"). The second half of the book covers different approaches in different schools. The message is good (if obvious), the content shallow.

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. But do I expect that everyone will share my point of view? No. I realize that some people will think that knowing a single culture inside out is better than having direct experience with many cultures. And the fact that this book and everything else I've read about bilingualism doesn't give the same respect to this alternate point of view that monolingualism can be superior in some ways is what made me cringe when I was reading this book.

THE INSIGHT

All this brings me to what I think is the most valuable thing I took out of the book. What does it mean to be multilingual? Who are you comparing to and what are you comparing? Do you expect that in every of the languages a multilingual speaks, their command of that language will be as good as of a monolingual person? This is not reasonable. Is is even desirable? No one will give you the answer. You have to decide what the answer for you is.

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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.