Product Description

This book looks at how families can support and increase bilingualism through planned strategies. One such strategy is the one person-one language approach, where each parent speaks his or her language. Over a hundred families from around the world were questioned and thirty families were interviewed in-depth about how they pass on their language in bilingual or trilingual families.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #294434 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 220 pages

Review
Suzanne has written a superbly clear and accessible account of the daily challenges of family life with several languages. Her recommendations are substantiated by extensive research and show great insight into children's language development. I particularly enjoyed the numerous case-studies of multilingual families, and I would warmly recommend this book as the 21st Century guide to parents of multilingual children. - Helen Le Merle

About the Author
Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert is on the Editorial Board of the Bilingual Family Newsletter. Married to a Frenchman with three young children she has direct experience of bringing up children with two or three languages. They have lived as an expatriate family in Hungry, Egypt and Switzerland. Suzanne trained as a teacher of English as a second language and taught adults and children in Japan and Poland. In 1999 she completed a Master's dissertation on trilingual families and continues to research bilingual and trilingual families.

Customer Reviews

Not always the right approach
The One Parent - One Language Approach is well defended by this book but I found it counter to my own excellent experience of both parents using both languages in conversation with myself and my sister. The point about attempting to be a bilingual family is to follow an approach best suited to the whole family situation. This book is trying to pursuade you of a single method. I would recommend instead that you read The Bilingual Family by Edith Harding-Esch and Philip Riley which offers questions to the parents about how they can create a bilingual family and find right approach for them. "The Bilingual Family" is not as prescriptive in its approach and I welcome that. I have colleagues who are married to persons from other countries, and I have recommended that they read "The Bilingual Family" rather than "Language Strategies for Bilingual Families: The One-Parent - One-Language Approach."

In desperate need of a proof reader ...
As a language graduate and mother to two potentially bilingual children, I was very interested to read about the best strategies for achieving bilingualism. However, this book was so littered with horrendous spelling and grammar errors that I couldn't bring myself to read past the first chapter. This was a shame, as I am sure the content would have been both useful and informative. Surely a book written about language should contain a reasonable level of language itself. A poor standard of English will make the reader doubt the quality of the content. Please let me know when you have invested in a good proof reader and I will buy the next edition!

worthwhile read
I found this to be one of the better books on bringing up bilingual children and the one parent one language strategy seems to be working for our family (5,4,18m). I also liked the bilingual parents handbook (harding and riley) and raising multilingual children.