Raising a Bilingual Child, by Barbara Zurer Pearson

Oh, Barbara, if only I had discovered your book when it was first published in 2008! What grief I would have been spared!

Parents, if you are serious about achieving bilingual-ism, then read her book.

Zurer-Pearson covers so many essentials, from the research models to the variations in goals. She highlights parent households of same-language or different languages, bilingual and trilingual families, unevenly multi-linguals, and even issues with heritage bilinguals.


My own success has mirrored the advice she offers, here. So if you are just starting out, this book is worth sifting through!

The model... Did they break the model, or are they being faithful to it?

Now that my child's Mandarin proficiency is humming along at a pace and quality I find reasonable, I've got some time to revisit these posts...

To break up some of the key ideas and highlight them into shorter posts, make the ideas more searchable.

The model matters. The research exists. Your school should be working with a model that has been found to be successful.

So what is your school's supposed model? Ask your teachers, ask your principal. Find out if they even know...

Two-Way Language Immersion is supposed to have no more than 50% of the kids from English-Only backgrounds. (I'm saying English-Only more boldly because I'm writing for American audiences, where we are still very far behind the notion of bilingual and bi-literate proficiency overall.)

Take a look at your child's classroom. If more than half the kids are from a language that is NOT the desired language you want your kid to learn (in this blog's case, Mandarin), then you are in trouble.

There is no getting around it. I still hear parents making all kinds of excuses. But... if... and we do all this extra... besides, our goals are different...we just want some language, not too much...

Yes, I've heard it all before. Forget it. What you will find is that EVERYTHING collapses. Academics, cognitive development... If the model is broken, the model is broken. Things won't "work" the way they are supposed to work.