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A Parents' and Teachers' Guide to Bilingualism (Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, No 5)
by Colin Baker
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Multilingual Matters Limited (1995-05)
ISBN: 1853592641
EAN: 9781853592645
Dewy Decimal #: 649.157
Paperback: 240 pages
SKU: T070819-5912
Condition: Acceptable
Comments: Good overall condition. No writing, tight binding. Pages wave due to moisture exposure. Ships same day or next in a bubble mailer. Enjoy.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
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.
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Customer Reviews
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useful, but somewhat weak and full of itself
Rating  (2)
Date: 2007-07-16
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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Bilingual Children
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-02-08
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.
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Ad nauseam
Rating  (3)
Date: 2005-04-12
24 out of 27 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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Thorough Guide for the Inquiring Parent
Rating  (4)
Date: 2005-01-18
15 out of 16 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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For All Parents with a Bad Bilingual Conscience
Rating (5)
Date: 2004-06-03
20 out of 20 customers found this reveiw helpful
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.
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