Multilingualism From Infancy To Adolescence

This book studies the acquisition, loss and re-acquisition of Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Hebrew, the first languages of this writer's son. It applies the results of current work in the areas of psycholinguistics, bilingualism, and applied linguistics to the study of language development in one multilingual child, Noam, from birth to age 17.

This book studies the acquisition, loss and re-acquisition of Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Hebrew, the first languages of this writer's son. It applies the results of current work in the areas of psycholinguistics, bilingualism, and applied linguistics to the study of language development in one multilingual child, Noam, from birth to age 17. The acquisition, loss, and re-acquisition of four languages by Noam also is compared with that of other children studied by the author and others. This book uncovers linguistic, cognitive, psychological, and social mechanisms of language acquisition, loss, and re-acquisition and documents the child's increasing, decreasing, and, in turn, increasing proficiency in four languages. This book applies Dromi's guidelines for qualitative case-study research to the study of language development in one multilingual child (Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, English), Noam, from birth to age seventeen. In addition, the results of Noam's case study are compared with other case studies conducted by this author as well as by other researchers.

This book contains reports of research on bilingualism in infants and children as well as perspectives from those involved in cross-linguistic research on language development, literacy development in bilingual children, and psycholinguistic research on bilingualism in adults. It offers a fresh multidisciplinary perspective and next steps for research on childhood bilingualism.

The teenage years are a fascinating time in the life of any family, but what happens when the challenges of parenting teenagers are combined with the desire to help your children build on their multilingual abilities? In this follow-up to Growing up with Three Languages: Birth to Eleven, Xiao-lei Wang offers a unique insight into the dynamics of a multilingual family. She combines practical, evidence-based advice with rich detail from observations of her own family to offer support and inspiration on an aspect of multilingual parenting that has received comparatively little attention. By placing language within the wider context of teenagers’ cognitive and social development, this book will enable parents everywhere to help and guide their children through the next step in their multilingual journey.

Have you ever been told that raising your child to speak multiple languages will harm their development? Are teachers or other professionals suspicious of your efforts? Are you sometimes unsure if you are helping your child’s language development, or are you uncertain where to start? It is increasingly recognised among researchers that, far from harming a child’s development, being exposed to multiple languages from birth or early childhood can result in linguistic, creative and social advantages. The authors, all multilinguals themselves, parents of multilingual children, and researchers on language and multilingualism, aim to provide advice and inspiration for multilingual families across the world. The latest research on multilingualism and the authors’ own experiences are used to provide a friendly, accessible guide to raising and nurturing happy multilingual children.

This book is a guide for parents who wish to raise children with more than one language and literacy. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, as well as the experiences of parents of multilingual children, this book walks parents through the multilingual reading and writing process from infancy to adolescence. It identifies essential literacy skills at each developmental stage and proposes effective strategies that facilitate multiliteracy, in particular, heritage-language literacy development in the home environment. This book can also be used as a reference for teachers who teach in community heritage language schools and in school heritage (or foreign) language programmes.

The ability to speak two or more languages is a common human experience, whether for children born into bilingual families, young people enrolled in foreign language classes, or mature and older adults learning and using more than one language to meet life's needs and desires. This Handbook offers a developmentally oriented and socially contextualized survey of research into individual bilingualism, comprising the learning, use and, as the case may be, unlearning of two or more spoken and signed languages and language varieties. A wide range of topics is covered, from ideologies, policy, the law, and economics, to exposure and input, language education, measurement of bilingual abilities, attrition and forgetting, and giftedness in bilinguals. Also explored are cross- and intra-disciplinary connections with psychology, clinical linguistics, second language acquisition, education, cognitive science, neurolinguistics, contact linguistics, and sign language research.

We now know much more about the process of language development in all children, and also much more about variations in the process due to multi-cultural and multi-linguistic backgrounds, and developmental anomalies. The book describes both the remarkable changes in language knowledge and use that occur from infancy through high school, and also the differences in the process due to variations in experience. What has been found to be good educational practice during each of these stages is discussed, emphasising that among other things, good practice involves awareness of, and planning for, diversity in the abilities of children.