How can the potential of a bilingual home environment can be systematically utilized towards helping young children to be successful blinguals and biliterates?
I advise you to check out my colleague Charles Haynes who is very much engaged in these issues.
My children grew up trilingual. I"m bilingual (Eng. and Malay) while my husband spoke German. You need to be CONSEQUENT. My husband spoke entirely German with the kids while I speak both. I speak more Malay in the home environment and English for the school and academic environment. Since Malay is not an active language out of the home environment, i think the kids should at least be able to communicate and read the Malay language. Young children have the capability to learn 6-7 languages before the brain begins to split into the left and right hemispheres. I read a lot of Francois Grosjean and Shana Poplack in the 90s while my kids were growing up.
Dear Margaret and Norehan, thank you for your important tips. It is great to hear your kids story, Norehan.
I advise you to read the following book which debunks myths about raising bi/multilingual children.
Grosjean, F. (2012). Bilingual: Life and Reality. : ISBN-13: 978-0674066137
Kassahun: My book Three is a Crowd? reports the trilingual development of my three children from birth up to adolescence, two languages at home and a third one, their school language, in the different countries where we’ve lived. Parts of the book are available online, here:
http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb=9781853598388
Scroll down to Book Preview and click on Contents.
My blog Being Multilingual contains several articles on multilingual children’s linguistic, cognitive and social development, choose the tags ‘child’ and ‘school’ down the page for the most relevant ones:
http://beingmultilingual.blogspot.com/
I hope this helps!
Madalena
Genesee's research is mostly on education, but some of his studies and others reviewed in his books are about home environment.
http://www.psych.mcgill.ca/perpg/fac/genesee/fredadd.html#Books
Dear Madalena, Phaedra and Yesenia,
I appreciate your cooperation! Thank you very much!
This site might be helpful: http://www.bilingualism-matters.ppls.ed.ac.uk/ . We also have a reading list for studies on child-directed speech in bilinguals/multilinguals on our resource site for research on child-directed speech: https://childdirectedspeech.wordpress.com/books-and-articles/bilingual-and-multilingual-cds/ . LinkedIn has groups related to multilingualism and parenting.
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