Books about bilingual parenting [Season 3, Episode 4]

Kletsheads [English edition]

Transcript

In this episode we review two books about bilingual parenting: Bilingual success stories around the world by Adam Beck and Bilingual families. A practical language planning guide by Eowyn Crisfield.

We get the parental perspective from Maria Papantoniou, a Greek-speaking mother raising her child bilingually in the UK together with her Greek-speaking husband, and Sam Timmermans, a Dutch-speaking father who until recently lived in the UK with his wife and two children.

Language scientist Ludovica Serratrice joins me to evaluate the books from a research perspective. Ludovica is Professor of Bi-Multilingualism at the University of Reading in the UK, where she is also Director of the Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism and where she teaches on the BSc in Speech and Language Therapy. Read more about her research on the language development and processing of bilingual children and adults here.

In Let’s Klets we speak to Daphne Vlachojannis, mother to three multilingual children, currently living in Greece. She tells us how she went about writing (and re-writing) her family language plan as her family expanded and moved countries. You can read more about Daphne and the work she is doing as a consultant at Raising Bilingual Children here.

During this episode I referred to an earlier episode of the podcast with Eowyn. That was our very first episode How to plan for a bilingual child. I also mentioned the Planting Languages project. Their website shares materials in several languages which can be used by parents and professionals to think about which resources are available, the family goals, and many other factors which come into play when writing a family language plan.