Bilingual Children: A Guide for Parents

✍ Scribed by Jürgen M. Meisel

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 278
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Are you raising your child bilingually, or planning to do so in the future, but are unsure how to proceed? Using a question-and-answer format, this practical and reassuring guide will enable readers to make informed decisions about how to raise their child with two or more languages. To grow up bilingually is a necessity or an opportunity for more children today than ever before. However, parents are frequently uncertain about what to do, or even fear that they may be putting their child's development at risk. Disentangling fact from myth, it shows that a child can acquire more than one 'first' language simultaneously and that one language need not have negative effects on the other. Each chapter is devoted to a question typically asked by parents in counselling sessions, followed by a concise answer, summaries of the evidence and practical tips.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface
List of Abbreviations
1 Bilingualism in Early Childhood: Disentangling Myths and Facts
1.1 Myths or Facts?
1.2 Searching for Facts in Research on Child Bilingualism
1.3 Goals of This Book – and How to Use it
1.4 Reading Suggestions
2 How Infants Become Native Speakers
2.1 The Human Language Making Capacity
2.2 Developmental Sequences in the Acquisition of Grammars
2.3 An Endowment for Bilingualism
2.4 Reading Suggestions
3 Two Languages in One Mind: Differentiating Linguistic Systems
3.1 Confused by a Multilingual Environment?
3.2 Separating Languages in a Child’s Mind
3.3 One Person, One Language? Talk, Talk, Talk!
3.4 Reading Suggestions
4 Keeping Languages Apart: Mixing, Interference and Interaction of Languages
4.1 Children’s Mixing and Switching of Languages
4.2 Interaction of Languages in Children’s Minds
4.3 Parents’ Language Choices
4.4 Reading Suggestions
5 Language Dominance: Strong and Weak Languages
5.1 When Children Refuse to Speak One of Their Languages
5.2 The Weaker Language: Deficient or Delayed?
5.3 Making the Weaker Language Strong Again
5.4 Reading Suggestions
6 Trilingual and More: The Role of Input
6.1 Native Speakers of More Than Two Languages
6.2 Quantity and Quality of Input
6.3 How Many Is Too Many?
6.4 Reading Suggestions
7 The Age Question
7.1 Multiple First Languages or Second Language Acquisition in Childhood?
7.2 Critical Periods for Language Development
7.3 Successive Bilingualism
7.4 Reading Suggestions
8 Benefits and Advantages of Child Bilingualism
8.1 Making the Most of One’s Endowment
8.2 Benefits Beyond Linguistic Skills
8.3 Living Multicultural Lives
8.4 Reading Suggestions
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Other Sources
Index