Bilingual Children: A Guide for Parents

by Jürgen M. Meisel

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.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

Published August 8, 2019

About the author

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Jürgen M. Meisel is a Professor of French, Portuguese and Spanish at the University of Hamburg, Germany.

He has researched into first and second language acquisition, multilingualism, and grammatical theory. Meisel is also one of the four chief editors of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Cambridge University Press.

Reviews

[Quinton · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can tell you why this book has so few reviews. It is not readable. It is astonishing how the author manages to turn even the most simple ideas into inaccessibly convoluted sentences. The author has really missed the mark when it comes to register here - the Venn diagram overlap of those who would be capable of reading and understanding the book and those who would benefit from its knowledge I can only guess is vanishingly paltry.
Some quotes from the first 30 pages (all I read):
page 13: "Finally, lexical or grammatical competence refers to the knowledge of a speaker as well as to the description of this knowledge by linguists. We hope, of course, that the latter renders adequately the crucial properties of the former, but since we do not have direct access to competences, linguists' grammar can only be approximate accounts of the mental representations of the linguistic competences of speakers" my translation: 'If we think of someone as good at a language, it is based on what we observed, since we don't know what they actually know'
page 15: "They would have to be interpreted as performance phenomena. Remember that competent speakers possess not only lexical and grammatical knowledge of their languages, they are also able to activate this competence when using the language in communicative interaction. This is by no means a trivial statement. What is self-evident is that performance presupposes that there is something to be performed, in our case linguistic knowledge." my translation: 'We are judging people by how they use their languages, not their theoretical knowledge of them'
page 18: "I should add that habituation of mechanisms and routines is a decisive factor in language processing. When the frequency with which they are activated decreases significantly, activating them again later requires more effort, they tend to operate at a slower rate and are prone to more variability in successful performance." my translation: 'If you don't use a language, you get rusty, even if you still have the same knowledge as before'
page 28: "This is not a contradictory statement, and it is not as trivial as it might sound. Rather, [...] it is an incentive to search for the underlying causes that result in either commonalities or particularities. These questions are of considerable interest if we want to understand our linguistic capacities, the linguistic competence of adults, as well as children's language acquisition." my translation: 'I think this idea is important'

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent content! (5/5)
Meisel provides concrete advice with accompanying rationale. He explains the theory and research with sufficient depth for the enthusiastic amateur, as well giving further references for those interested. I like that he highlights the strength of the findings in different areas of research. (Some are well-established, others more tenuous. Many authors leave out this crucial information.)

Stylistically atrocious! (2/5)
Meisel seems like a nice guy, but someone needs to hit him over the head with a style book. Every sentence is needlessly convoluted and long-winded. A good editor could cut this book down to 100 pages without loss of content.

[Johanka Havrdová · Rating 4 out of 5]

When you wake up one day and realize that apart from the difficult task, such as raising a child, you also have to bring it up bilingually and biculturally, and you have no idea how to do such a thing, this book will give you all the answers you need!
Jürgen Meisel worked for many years as a counselor at Hamburg University in Germany. He also worked in language acquisition and with children exposed to two or more languages. His experience in this particular field led him to write this guide for parents, which answers almost all possible questions that might cross our minds regarding multilingual upbringing.
The author mastered the balance between the informative and professional side of things and the catchy and exciting journey to discover the secrets of multilingualism. The way he puts his findings in words might be a little bit complicated for someone who never heard about bilingualism, however, I believe that after few chapters, even those who started as newcomers to this problematic, will be able to continue without further problems.
The book is divided into chapters (one of the main questions) which have their subchapters. The author put a guide on how to read his guide, which I find really amusing and quite practical. The first part of the chapter is the one introducing the problem and answering the questions. The second part summarizes research results and the author suggests that the less technically interested readers might want to skip this part. The third is then offering guidelines following from the first part of the chapter. The fourth part is a book recommendation for those interested in research which led to the conclusions in the first and third sections.
This awesome way of dividing the book is very helpful for those who are interested in certain topics and don't necessarily need to read the whole book.
Apart from the questions like “how to help my child not to mix up the languages it learned” or “Is it possible not to have a dominant language as a bilingual person” this book offers a lot of insides into how multilingualism works or whether it's natural for people to learn more than one language as maternal ones. The fact that people in the world are mixing more and more makes this issue only more pressing but this book shows us from its very beginning that the topic of learning multiple languages is far from new and that there is nothing unnatural for a person to be brought up as multilingual.
Jürgen Meisel is trying to clarify some gray areas of bilingual and bicultural upbringing to help those who are not sure how to handle their family situations in the best way possible. His intention is not to force nor push parents to start raising their children in a bilingual environment. He is simply trying to support those parents who would consider suppressing one of the parent's language to not confuse the child.

[Wej · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected more practical advice from this book. It's a guide for parents to understand bilingual children rather than a guide to raise one. Large parts of the book explain the current state of research on bi- and multilingualism. The author is a supporter of bilingual education but considers the potential disadvantages caused by bilingualism (e.g. delayed language development, speech dysfluencies, or switching costs) and provides evidence that they are mostly myths.

In terms of practical advice, the main ones involve speaking as much as possible with the child, exposing the child to multiple speakers, one-parent-one-language is a well-tested method, there in no clear upper bound of language that can be acquired natively, but the problem is the quantity and quality of input so realistically three (four if you are pushing it) seems to be the limit.

Favourite trivia: "A rather special case is linguistic exogamy. It is practised, for example, in Tucano (or Tukano) communities in the Colombian-Brazilian border area where Eastern Tucanoan languages are spoken. Family membership is defined by the language an individual speaks, more precisely by one’s father’s language. People speaking the same language are therefore considered to be brothers and sisters. Since marriages between brothers and sisters are not tolerated, one can only marry someone who speaks a different language."

[Ola · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a parent of a bilingual child, this is a very useful book summarising the current state of research from someone who has worked in the field for decades. The focus is on children being raised multilingual from birth, although successive multilingualism is also discussed. Beware - you will need to absorb some linguistic jargon. On the whole, the level of detail does help in understanding what underpins the author's recommendations. From a practical perspective, you'll find guidance about overall strategies that parents and caregivers can adopt more than solutions to specific problems, although there are some examples of what parents actually tried that helped. I would definitely recommend it and it has reassuring messages on a number of topics that may trouble parents, such as language mixing.

[Victoria Katsaros · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll be honest this was a very difficult read for me the way everything is written seems unnecessarily complicated and I found myself re-reading most of the book multiple times to try and comprehend what was being written. I think it still has good ideas and evidence based knowledge I just wish it was a bit easier to read as a mother to 3 I don't have a ton of extra time to read a book 3 times just to understand it.

[Johana Oliva Lovell · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's an amazing book to understand deeply how bilingualism (and beyond) benefits children. Language is very academic which I loved but I know for some this could be too strong. My favourite part was reading all the study examples with kids learning 2,3,4 and even 5 languages at the same time!

[Mansi Qadeer · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite linguistic field to research was bilingualism. First and second language acquistion (Spanish & Portuguese).

[Artoemius · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best book about practical questions of bilingualism in children among the few that I've read. A bit long-winded at times, but worth reading if your child is (going to be) bilingual.