Becoming Bilingual… All the Cool Kids Are Doing It

Madonna’s doing it, Johnny Depp is doing it, and so is Antonio Banderas. Each of these celebrities is raising their children bilingually. There are mountains of evidence that strongly suggest lifelong benefits extending from childhood bilingualism. In Raising a Bilingual Child: A Step-by-Step Guide for Parents (April 15, 2008; $14.95), author and linguistics expert Barbara Zurer Pearson, PhD, shows parents how to raise a bilingual child and realize these crucial intellectual and cultural benefits, while exploring the fascinating process by which children acquire language.

Raising a Bilingual Child is an easy to follow manual that provides solid scientific arguments for raising a child bilingually, supplies parents with practical steps to integrating two (or more) languages into their child’s daily routine, and ultimately empowers parents to feel qualified and confident about proactively establishing building blocks that can lead to a lifetime of success for their children.

Raising a Bilingual Child dispels the myths about childhood bilingualism and explains how it can enhance a child’s overall intellectual and emotional development. It also highlights some of the various reasons why both monolingual and bilingual parents choose to raise their children bilingually:

*Utilitarian Reasons—bilinguals have an advantage in the job market. A University of Miami study concluded that bilinguals earn more than monolinguals. *Cultural Reasons—bilingualism can improve relationships with extended family for their children. Language can give children special access to artifacts, customs, and rituals that define their heritage. *Adoption—monolingual parents want their children adopted from abroad to identify with their heritage.

The book provides practical advice about creating the right home environment to encourage and support bilingualism, including such information as:

*How to keep it fun and encourage progression with consistent praise. *Which daily activities should take place in the minority language *How to find group activities for children to participate in that motivate bilingualism. *How to organize the home for a child’s bilingual language development.

About the Author

Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D., is a Research Associate in Linguistics and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Communication Disorders at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She has over twenty years of research experience in the fields of language acquisition and bilingualism and did ground-breaking work on bilingual acquisition and assessment with her research group at the University of Miami. Most recently, Dr. Pearson worked on the Diagnostic Evaluation of Language Variation (DELV), a project to develop an innovative language assessment for children funded by the National Institutes of Health.