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

Rating:
Summary: Thorough Guide for the Inquiring Parent
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: For All Parents with a Bad Bilingual Conscience
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Good message, shallow & repetitive content
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Exactly what the title says
Review: 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.