Language Strategies for Trilingual Families: Parents' Perspectives (Parents' and Teachers' Guides)

This is a short, concise book that describes a recent study of numerous multi-lingual families living in England and Germany. A great addition to the library of the parent of a trilingual child (especially since there aren't a loot of books dealing specifically with trilinguals/multilinguals, as opposed to bilinguals).The book does not offer long explanations of various academic theories, but it instead describes the findings of authors' (very) recent research. Authors divide all multilingual families in several groups, depending on how many languages parents speak between themselves and how many languages their child could potentially be exposed to. Each group is then described separately. This is a very logical approach since there is a world of difference between a family where each parent speaks 3 different languages, and a family where each parent speaks 1 or 2 languages, in addition to the community language. The book offers many case studies and describes some of the problems multi-lingual families encounter: motivation, culture differences, the role of extended family, perceived "low status" of some languages, children switching languages after starting school etc.Overall, this is a great little book that offers ideas and encouragement for the multi-lingual parent and, more importantly, provides lists of current resources for further reading. It provides a realistic view of trilingualism - it's not easy but, with commitment and dedication, it can be done. Your kids will likely grumble along the way, but one day they will thank you.

I'm disappointed with this book. Lots of generic, non-specific information which everybody knows without researching the topic of multilingualism. Basic things are repeated again and again.. The authors describe experience of raising multilingual children of 70 families, mostly unsuccesssful, and don't provide solutions how to avoid mistakes. There is actually no theory at all, just some poor stats.This book discouraged me instead of providing solutions and support.

Unfortunately no advise on how to teach your kids languages, only description of trilingual families with their background. Interesting to read about them but def not helpful in my situation at ll

interesting research, but not really a practical to trilingual education...

Great research on a topic that is so hard to find ! I liked especially that it discussed which strategies worked and which did not work. I hope that more studies and more research will follow on trilingual families.

This book has been very disappointing. It was a waste of money and time. It contains very little practical advice. The title is misleading because it suggests that the book describes successful strategies for trilingualism, possibly backed by some research. Not at all the case. It describes what 70 families have been doing, with mixed degrees of success (many, one could say, unsuccessful).It is also a very repetitive read. At 100 pages, it is essentially an extremely padded blog entry, where the same ideas are repeated over and over again, and in one case the same interview is even reported twice - bizarrely, with different names.From a statistical perspective, I believe the sample was both not significant, and also biased, because the families were mostly people who were being unsuccessful and looking for help, e.g. online.This makes for a fairly discouraging reading, whereas raising a trilingual child in a monolingual society requires a lot of encouragement.A much better, useful, encouraging, practical and researched book is  Growing Up with Three Languages: Birth to Eleven (Parents' and Teachers' Guides) . Yes, it is based on a sample of one family (the author's), but it references tons of research that back up the methodology explained and the _strategies_ suggested. If it weren't for that book I may have caved in to the community language, at least to some degree, but I'm proud of having stuck to my guns (and to my heritage language), so far with very positive results. Growing Up with Three Languages: Birth to Eleven (Parents' and Teachers' Guides)

It is a well-written semi-scientific book (semi, because it is quite short to my disappointment). It contains a lot of useful advice and observations. I also appreciate the amount of work contributed to write this short book. However, like some other reviewers observed, the authors bring too many examples and it all becomes a bit chaotic with little straighforward guidelines. The main advantage of this book for me was to realise how complex the field is and how different are the families. The other advantage was that I managed to find a family who pass on their three languages in exactly the same way we do it with our child. It is not recommended and not a mainstream method, but someone else has done it successfully, so I feel relieved.The other good thing is that reading through other parents mistakes you get warned what not to do.

This book is research piece by the two authors in trilingual families in England and Germany.Although practises and strategies of how to raise a trilingual child are not described at a length, the book is very well structured, clearly setting out what it is trying to do and clearly demonstrating how various families are dealing with multilingualism.In summary, I would highly recommend this book, purely because it offers an exceptional starting point to your research on how to raise a trilingual child. The references to other material in the book are very useful.Thank you to the authors

Good book for parents wanting to raise a trilingual child. It has good suggestions of how to go about it and I like that it has lots of first hand accounts people going through the process, as it makes it feel more attainable. The only down side is that it gets a bit repetitive so after the first couple of chapters I only focused on what I thought was relevant for me and my family.

Very disappointing. Nearly no practical advice. All the "strategies" can be summarized in one page.