Review of Meisel, J. (2019). Bilingual children: A guide for parents. Cambridge University Press.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Meisel intends for this book to be a use-as-you-need resource for parents looking for research-based guidance on raising a child bilingually.He uses years of professional counselling experience and academic work as a faculty member on bilingualism to write this book.He admits to being pro-bilingualism, and the information he offers supports his belief.This book uses UNESCO's definition of bi-and multilingualism: "the use of more than one language in daily life" (UNESCO, n.d., as cited in Meisel, 2019, p. 2).A main argument of this book, nuanced with research and anecdotes, is that early and adequate exposure to the target languages is all it takes for children to become bilingual.This guide is relevant for a variety of audiences: parents who speak separate languages, parents who speak the same language but are living in a place where another language is the majority, parents who speak separate languages but communicate at home in a third language, and so on.There are a variety of examples, summarized from the body of research, that reflect different family structures, living situations, social contexts, and immigration statuses, making this book applicable for a range of audiences.There is a comprehensive index of concepts and languages, which may be of interest to parents looking for language-specific guidance.The book's eight chapters are presented by the author as independent of each other, however there are references in the later chapters to information discussed in preceding ones.While it is possible to read the chapters as-needed or out of order, better understanding would come from reading the book from beginning to end.Each thematic chapter is divided into the same sections: 1) an outline of problems or worries identified by parents in requests for counselling and the solutions Meisel offers, 2) summaries of research results which inform the answers to problems in section one, 3) practical aspects and guidelines, and 4) further reading suggestions.The repetitive structure of the chapter formats and the text boxes makes the book digestible and easy to follow.The author suggests that sections one and three of each chapter may be the most pertinent to parents who are looking for practical guidance, without wanting to know the research therein.While these sections may be the most practical to parents, reading the chapter as a whole, he claims, is not necessary.The eight chapters each detail a different theme related to bilingualism in raising children.The first two chapters differ from the rest in that they are an introduction to myths and facts in bilingualism and an outline of language acquisition in infants and toddlers, respectively.The remaining six chapters (e.g., chapters three through eight) then cover a range of themes related to perceived issues for parents.Chapter 3 discusses ways that children differentiate linguistic systems, outlining alleged risks of childhood bilingualism.This chapter offers a discussion of the oft-heard phrase "One Person, One Language", which Meisel notes is a helpful framework but encourages parents to be flexible if the situation requires it.The takeaway here is that it is most important to talk with and talk to your child in meaningful interactions.In Chapter 4, the discussion surrounds how children mix and switch languages, addressing the concern that children will fuse languages together, have excessive mental strain, or be unable to separate the linguistic systems.Bilingual children and adults exhibit similar behaviours when code-switching and operating in bilingual contexts, meaning there is no evidence that notable confusion exists between languages for children learning two languages.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".