Language Strategies for Bilingual Families is an interesting set of observations about how language acquisition environments function.  It is not a guide providing definitive best practices or specific direction to parents.  It does, however, contain valuable information on topics of interest to parents of bilingual children that are not adequately covered in other literature in the field.  It also contextualizes families’ efforts at bilingual education, highlighting the devil in the details of implementing the one-parent-one-language approach (also called one-person-one-language or OPOL).

Author, Parent, Teacher and Researcher
Author Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert is a British parent with a French spouse who, prior to having children, taught English as a foreign language in international schools in Asia and Eastern Europe.  She heard from friends and parents of her students that OPOL is the best strategy for raising bilingual children and began using it at home when she became a parent.  Once her first child was born and she and her husband began to employ OPOL she realized how many questions and decision points arise for parents raising bilingual children.  She began to compile a list of questions about implementing OPOL and this book was an outgrowth of efforts to answer those questions.  Barron-Hauwaert has a Masters in education with a dissertation on trilingual families and is a member of the Bilingual Family Newsletter Editorial Board. 

The Book and its Thesis
The book begins with a description of the OPOL approach and the history of research into its use.  It then covers employing OPOL strategies with very young and school age children, OPOL and the extended family, trilingual families, how parents’ attitudes affect their children’s bilingualism, and parental strategies for OPOL implementation.  It concludes with “a working model of OPOL for the 21st Century.”   The book contains a glossary of bilingual education-related terms and a list of information sources for bilingual families. 

As stated in the term one-parent-one-language, the method involves each parent (or primary caregiver) speaking to their children in only one language, usually their native tongue.  The goal of OPOL is for children to learn both languages simultaneously and become balanced bilinguals.  Barron-Hauwaert wrote Language Strategies for Bilingual Families in order to explore whether “one-person-one-language or any other specific language strategy is as important and relevant as the books and guidance for parents suggest” (ix).  This is a difficult thesis to either prove or disprove and the book does not really tackle this question in the manner implied.  The book is neither a practical guide for parents nor a research summary illuminating findings about the effectiveness of OPOL or other approaches to bilingual education within families.  Rather, it is a lengthy discussion of and set of observations about the implementation of the OPOL strategy in real family contexts.

Strengths
The OPOL approach is based on the isolated language relationship of each parent with their children, however it is only when children are very young and generally cared for at home that such a relationship occurs.  For most of children’s lives they are relating to their dual language parents together or to one parent in the context of others (e.g.: siblings, other relatives, friends, educators, community members).  Barron-Hauwaert does an admirable job of demonstrating the complexities and permutations of the real-life language environments in which families teach children.  The intricate interactions that take place in family-wide and family/community communications occur every day around the dinner table, talking with neighbors, visiting the home country, and out shopping.  These interactions highlight the complexities that arise in implementing an OPOL approach, complexities that are often neglected in descriptions of using OPOL.

Barron-Hauwaert provides discussion of topics most parents of bilingual children grapple with, including language mixing and switching, the influence of grandparents and siblings, and reluctance and refusal to speak one of the family’s languages.  Barron-Hauwaert breaks-down OPOL implementation into very specific scenarios, for example what can happen when the mother speaks only the language of the country in which the family lives, when the father does, when parents speak the country language together, when they speak the minority language together, etc.  The book discusses how the language proficiency of parents influences their children’s bilingual education and how the positive and negative opinions of relatives and other caregivers can impact families’ efforts. 

The book is replete with case studies taken from a survey and follow-up interviews conducted by Barron-Hauwaert and from materials published in the Bilingual Family Newsletter.  The author’s survey findings are presented throughout the book in charts on topics such as in which situations minority language parents speak their native tongues, percentages of siblings speaking mothers’, fathers’ or other languages, and levels of support for bilingualism from grandparents. 

Weaknesses
Despite an extensive review of research into OPOL and widespread use of case studies, the book lacks hard data on definitive best practices in implementing OPOL, relying instead on anecdotes.  The book reviews and summarizes research on OPOL, but these summaries are mostly presented to provide an historical context that is not necessarily relevant or interesting to parents seeking practical advice on how to succeed in raising children bilingually.   Other research that is quoted has generally been conducted on very small samples (10 families or fewer) and focuses more on observations about contexts than on findings about the effectiveness of OPOL or other approaches.

Barron-Hauwaert structures each chapter with two to four sections on specific topics related to the chapter’s theme.  She then provides brief information about each topic followed by extensive anecdotal information about families from her survey and follow-up interviews.  Most chapter sections then contain lists of quotes from parents or sample conversations related to the topic at hand and five case studies.  I did not find extensive lists of quotes about other parents’ concerns and numerous sample conversations useful.  Generally, I find one anecdote sufficient to illustrate a point.  The case studies, while interesting, were too numerous to take-in; after reading about one family with children’s names and ages and absorbing the point of one study, taking in four more was not possible for me.

The book winds-up by listing seven bilingual family education strategies, including variations on OPOL.  This overview is interesting, but most of the strategies described here are not discussed in the book.  The description of each strategy provides a little information on its strengths and, of course, plenty of anecdotal information, but few definitive conclusions or concrete advice for parents about how to select the best strategy or the best way to implement it.

Near the end of the book, Barron-Hauwaert states that parents often modify the OPOL strategy as their children grow and shares her opinion that OPOL may be best suited to very young children.  No data is provided to back this conclusion up, however, nor is it presented as a conclusion, simply mentioned in passing.  There is one very interesting graph near the end of the book depicting children’s language proficiency compared to the parents’ language education strategy that provides outcome data about the effectiveness of various bilingual family education strategies.  Despite appearing to me to be the most critical piece of information in the entire book in terms of providing guidance to parents about strategy selection, the graph is not accompanied by any commentary on the data and no effort is made to draw special attention to it.

Assessment/Recommendation
As a guide, Language Strategies for Bilingual Families doesn’t provide much guidance.  The book functions more to document what families do than to provide advice as to what families should do or to prove which strategies are most successful.   The book effectively describes a variety of bilingual family educational scenarios and discusses topics of real interest in the everyday work of raising bilingual children.  I give this book a qualified recommendation as an interesting but not essential companion to more practically oriented guides to bilingual family education.