How do bilingual brothers and sisters talk to each other? Sibling language use is an uncharted area in studies of bilingualism. From a perspective of independent researcher and parent of three bilingual children Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert discusses the issues of a growing bilingual or multilingual family. What happens when there are two or more children at different stages of language development? Do all the siblings speak the same languages? Which language(s) do the siblings prefer to speak together? Could one child refuse to speak one language while another child is fluently bilingual? How do the factors of birth order, personality or family size interact in language production? With data from over 100 international families this book investigates the reality of family life with two or more children and languages. -- Back cover.

How do bilingual brothers and sisters talk to each other? Sibling language use is an uncharted area in studies of bilingualism. From a perspective of independent researcher and parent of three bilingual children Suzanne Barron-Hauwaert discusses the issues of a growing bilingual or multilingual family. What happens when there are two or more children at different stages of language development? Do all the siblings speak the same languages? Which language(s) do the siblings prefer to speak together? Could one child refuse to speak one language while another child is fluently bilingual? How do the factors of birth order, personality or family size interact in language production? With data from over 100 international families this book investigates the reality of family life with two or more children and languages.

This revised edition of Bilingualism in Schools and Society is an accessible introduction to the sociolinguistic and educational aspects of and the political issues surrounding bilingualism, including code-switching in popular music, advertising, and online social spaces. It also addresses the personal aspect of the topic in a well-informed discussion of what it means to study and live with multiple languages in a globalized world and practical advice on raising bilingual children. Extensive new material has been added that deals with more holistic understandings of bilingual performance, including translanguaging, flexible bilingualism, and code-meshing; blending standard and vernacular languages/dialects in hybrid texts; and recent developments in policies surrounding the education of English Learners and EL assessment, including Common Core State Standards (CCSS), PARCC and SBAC testing, WIDA and ELPA21 language assessments, and Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Updated and new discussions on community-based heritage language programs and 'super-diversity' further enhance this new edition, along with updated statistics on bilingual populations and the world's top languages. Each chapter includes lists of further readings, helpful digital resources and study questions, as well as student activities and boxed vignettes. Firmly grounded in the analysis of empirical work with bilingual children and adults in various multilingual settings throughout the world, Bilingualism in Schools and Society is the ideal text for courses on bilingualism in language education programs.

In this volume, Benjamin Kinsella offers a meticulous account of six Mexican families in New Jersey, identifying how birth order influences the different dimensions of heritage language maintenance.

Growing up with Two Languagesis aimed at the many parents and professionals who feel uncertain about the best ways to help children who are in contact with more than one language and culture to gain maximum benefit from the situation.

Share the joys of becoming a big brother! With the arrival of a new baby comes many transitions, and big brothers may need a little extra tender loving care to adjust to a new family situation. This sweet story with adorable toddler illustrations by Caroline Jayne Church is just right to share with and prepare an older brother getting ready for an expanding family.

In this accessible guide to bilingualism in the family and the classroom, Colin Baker delivers a realistic picture of the joys and difficulties of raising bilingual children. This revised edition includes more information on bilingualism in the digital age, and incorporates the latest research in areas such as neonatal language experience, multilingualism and language mixing.

This book looks at how families can support and increase bilingualism through planned strategies. One such strategy is the one person-one language approach, where each parent speaks his or her language. Over a hundred families from around the world were questioned and thirty families were interviewed in-depth about how they pass on their language in bilingual or trilingual families.

This book is based on an eleven-year observation of two children who were simultaneously exposed to three languages from birth. It tells the story of two parents from different cultural, linguistic, and ethnic-racial backgrounds who joined to raise their two children with their heritage languages outside their native countries. It also tells the children’s story and the way they negotiated three cultures and languages and developed a trilingual identity. It sheds light on how parental support contributed to the children’s simultaneous acquisition of three languages in an environment where the main input of the two heritage languages came respectively from the father and from the mother. It addresses the challenges and the unique language developmental characteristics of the two children during their trilingual acquisition process.

The purpose of this study was to investigate if there was a relationship between birth order and language proficiency in English and Spanish bilingual children. This study used data from a preexisting dataset. Participants included 49 Spanish-English bilingual children (age 4;6-7;0), who had at least one sibling. Participants were recruited from school districts in Texas, California, and Pennsylvania during the original study. The investigator examined relationships among birth order, number of children, and language measures. Semantic and morphosyntactic language abilities were measured through the participant's performance on the corresponding subtests of the Bilingual English Spanish Assessment (BESA) (Peña, Gutiérrez-Clellen, Iglesias, Goldstein & Bedore, 2014) and through English productivity measures collected from language samples. These measures included: total number of words (TNW), number of different words (NDW), and mean length of utterances in words (MLUw). Significant correlations were found between birth order and number of children and English measures of semantics. The findings in this current study suggest that earlier born siblings and fewer siblings in the family were related to higher English semantics scores. In addition, these variables were also linked to higher levels of English proficiency as determined by their performance in TNW and NDW.