Language Strategies for Bilingual Families ─ The One-Parent-One-Language Approach

Writing for parents of multilingual families, Barron-Hauwaert promotes the planned strategy of associating one person with one language in the home, thereby teaching children several languages as a natural process with a minimum of confusion. She also examines other strategies such as mixed use, and keeping the minority language at home. After a chapter explaining the strategy, Barron-Hauwaert describes the process for the first three years of a child's life, starting school and becoming bicultural, interaction between family members, expectations and reality, special considerations of families with three or more languages, alternate strategies, and the role of the multilingual parent in the twenty-first century. She includes case studies, descriptions of research, a glossary, and a list of resources for parents. distributed in the US by UTP Distribution. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert is on the Editorial Board of the Bilingual Family Newsletter. Married to a Frenchman with three young children she has direct experience of bringing up children with two or three languages. They have lived as an expatriate family in Hungry, Egypt and Switzerland. Suzanne trained as a teacher of English as a second language and taught adults and children in Japan and Poland. In 1999 she completed a Master's dissertation on trilingual families and continues to research bilingual and trilingual families.