A Parents' and Teachers' Guide to Bilingualism, 2nd Edition,
By Colin Baker,
Multilingual Matters, 2000, UK.

This guide to bilingualism is focused on providing answers to questions commonly asked by parents and teachers about raising and educating bilingual children. It includes sections on childrearing, language development and education with a focus on common problems and central issues around bilingualism in the home and classroom. The book covers bilingual speech, reading and writing.

Author and Bilingual Advocate
The author, Colin Baker, raised bilingual children with his wife, and he is a professor of education at a university in Wales that specializes in bilingualism. He has written six books and many articles on bilingualism and given many presentations on the topic. Mr. Baker approaches bilingual education from an advocacy perspective; he is convinced that bilingualism has intellectual and potential economic benefits for individuals and he supports families maintaining their cultural identities. Mr. Baker not only highlights the benefits of bilingualism, he realistically highlights obstacles. As he states early in the book, “There are many hurdles but few insurmountable barriers to children reaching whatever bilingual language destination is possible.” He provides sound strategies for developing bilingualism and uses the book as an opportunity to debunk myths about the drawbacks of bilingual education.

Defining and Approaching Bilingualism
Mr. Baker calls language both part of a larger culture and a means of communication. Accordingly, bilingualism is a component of a child's developing cultural identity and a practical method for relating to others and acquiring an education. In the home, this means that while language is an important facet of biculturalism, it is only one of many facets. In the classroom, this means that children must be fluent in the language in which they are being educated in order to adequately benefit from that education.

Mr. Baker advocates a progressive, child-centered and family-centered approach to learning a second language. A child-centered approach focuses on the child's developmental needs and creates internal motivation within the child to achieve language proficiency. A family-centered approach focuses on the goals of the family and tailors bilingualism to the family setting (for example, how the family relates to the ‘majority' culture and whether the family has access to other native language speakers in their community or abroad).

Mr. Baker acknowledges the breadth of family situations and structures that the term bilingual encompasses. The book addresses topics of concern to families with one and two bilingual parents, those that move from one country and language to another, families that are part of second language communities and those that are isolated, and families that speak two nationally recognized (majority) languages as well as those that speak a majority and minority language. It includes advice for single parents and adoptive parents and it addresses the variations that occur in teaching children of different ages and children with multilingual siblings. The book also recognizes and describes in detail the wide variety of language learning strategies that parents and schools employ. Consequently, the book is broadly useful as an introduction to bilingualism and in addressing specific concerns that arise in individual families and classrooms.

The Book's Goals and Strengths
The intent of the book is to provide information to non-technical readers, and it is formatted so the reader can either locate answers to specific questions and use the book as a reference source or read it cover-to-cover. The book's focus is a practical one, providing advice and guidance, not introducing or defining academic concepts. By and large the book achieves its goals. It provides sound introductory information geared toward a wide audience and it addresses specific concerns and issues which parents and teachers routinely encounter. The informal question and answer format is convenient for readers, especially as each question is listed in the table of contents for easy reference.

Mr. Baker is very thoughtful in dissecting the impacts of language, minority culture and majority culture when discussing bilingualism and identity. He carefully addresses the issue of subtractive language learning (when the majority culture's language is acquired at the expense of the family's primary language). As he says in the book, “A minority language is easily lost, a majority language easily gained.” His specific advice to ‘minority language' families in ‘majority language' societies is insightful and clearly presented.

Similarly, the author is careful to address bilingualism in the context of nurturing all aspects of a child's identity and education. For example, when academic performance issues arise, many parents of bilingual children begin questioning bilingualism's role before looking at other possible causes. Mr. Baker provides sound guidance for troubleshooting academic performance questions to determine whether language learning plays a part, but also reminds parents that bilingual children contend with all the usual issues of childhood in addition to bilingualism.

In the book's reading and writing section, the author provides an excellent overview of pre-literacy and literacy skills and a discussion of how language acquisition supports the acquisition of reading and writing skills. He makes excellent points about literacy skills being transferable across languages and alphabets/scripts. In this chapter, however, Mr. Baker provides so much detailed information that one entire section feels like a primer to the fundamentals of teaching reading and writing in general, a digression from the book's focus on bilingual learning.

The Book's Weaknesses
The book does have some weaknesses, but they are minor compared to the overall value of the work. Chief among Mr. Baker's weaknesses as an author is his tendency to over-use metaphor, for example portraying the parent as a “language gardener” planting and cultivating the seeds of bilingualism. This particular metaphor is so extensively used that it is carried from one paragraph to the next and found in chapter after chapter. Throughout the book, Mr. Baker uses the term “in-migrant” instead of immigrant to avoid any negative connotation, but the term sounds artificial and is distracting. It is an effort to avoid a negative connotation that most of this book's audience is unlikely to experience.

Generally, the author does a capable job of addressing the questions posed in the book. In the third question in the book, however, this did not occur. Instead of answering the question “Is the mother more important than the father in the child's language development?” directly, Mr. Baker uses it as jumping off point for providing encouragement to fathers to be as involved as possible in their children's bilingual education. The implication is that it is the amount of time a parent spends with their child, not the parent's gender that determines how great an influence that parent will have on their child's language acquisition, but this is never explicitly stated, nor is research on parents' influence cited.

While the book is not intended as an academic work, citing some research findings would clarify when the author's position is empirically validated and when it is his expert opinion. The author cites research in some cases and not in others without a discernable pattern. For example, when Mr. Baker describes children mixing two languages and when he discusses the influences of bilingual siblings, he makes claims but provides no citations, yet when he discusses trilingualism he does provide citations.

Recommendation
Despite some particular weaknesses, the book is a comprehensive and well thought out overview of bilingual language acquisition. It provides both sound guidance and enthusiastic encouragement to those seeking to support bilingual learning. I recommend the book to parents and educators seeking guidance in this area.

Colleen Laing is a freelance writer living in Seattle. She has a 3-year-old bilingual daughter. Colleen will be writing a monthly column for the BBFN newsletter about single-language parenting a bilingual child. Upcoming topics may include culture clashes, TV watching and, of course, traveling to the homeland. She welcomes feedback and article ideas at cblaing@oz.net.

©Colleen Laing

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