Product Description

The lives of many families involve contact with more than one language and culture on a daily basis. These children can potentially become proficient in both the languages around them, provided they receive enough input in both languages. Growing Up with Two Languages is aimed at the kany parents and professionals who feel uncertain about the best way to go about helping children to gain maximum benefit from the situation. Every family's situation is different, but there is a good deal that parents can do to make life with two languages easier for their children. Families often establish an informal system for deciding who speaks what language in which situation. Consistency in sticking to the system will be helpful to the child, especially at the beginning. The 'one person-one language' system, where each person speaks one of the languages (usually his/her native language) to the child and the 'minority language at home' system, where the entire family speaks the language which is not spoken in the community at home are two of the most common systems. There are, however, as many variations on these systems as there are families. There is no right or wrong way - here each family has to find its own system. Growing Up with Two Languages is illustrated by glimpses of life from interviews with fifty families from all around the world. The trials and rewards of life with two languages and cultures are discussed in detail, and followed by practical advice on how to support the child's linguistic development.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #426456 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 168 pages

Customer Reviews

A good introduction to the topic of biligualism
Good points: easy to read with many useful suggestions. Very up to date with a number of useful web site addresses.

Bad points: possibly a bit too simplistic and very general. More focused on families where English is the minority language.

I found 'The Biligual Family'by Harding and Riley more useful but it is more academic and has slightly different goals from this book.

good, but didn't meet my needs
This is a really good book if you're an English speaker, living in a country where English isn't spoken at all. There are lots of really interesting case studies and examples of how families cope with bilingualism.
However, it didn't meet my needs - we are a family living in Wales, where one parent speaks English as a first language, and the other speaks Welsh as a first language. Our situation may not be commonplace, but I didn't find the help I was looking for in this book.
I found Colin Baker's book 'A Parent's and Teacher's guide to bilingualism' met our needs more fully.
Some really good resources and web-site addresses though.

A good book to buy
This book is very good. I needed something that could give me examples of growing up children with two languages. The only thing that I had found before where negative answers. Here the authours talks about their experience and also about possibilities of different ways both in negative and positive matters. There are also lots of comments from another bilingual families. Their family is Swedish/English living in Sweden, where people understand English, instead mine is Icelandic/Italian one living in Italy. Where people actually say that are you bothering using Icelandic. I didn't find lots of hints for us which have a minor languages just spooken by one person without dialogues except the kids.