Analysis of bilinguals' use of two languages reveals highly adept code-switching: alternating between languages while keeping intact the separate grammars.

This book explores bilingual community education, specifically the educational spaces shaped and organized by American ethnolinguistic communities for their children in the multilingual city of New York. Employing a rich variety of case studies which highlight the importance of the ethnolinguistic community in bilingual education, this collection examines the various structures that these communities use to educate their children as bilingual Americans. In doing so, it highlights the efforts and activism of these communities and what bilingual community education really means in today's globalized world. The volume offers new understandings of heritage language education, bilingual education, and speech communities for bilingual Americans in the 21st century.

This text provides an overview of bi- and multilingualism as a worldwide phenomenon. It features comprehensive discussions of many of the linguistic, social, political, and educational issues found in an increasingly multilingual nation and world. To this end, the book takes the Chicano-Latino community of Southern California, where Spanish-English bilingualism has over a century and a half of history, and presents a detailed case study, thereby situating the community in a much broader social context. Spanish is the second most-widely spoken language in the U.S. after English, yet, for the most part, its speakers form a language minority that essentially lacks the social, political, and educational support necessary to derive the many cognitive, socioeconomic, and educational benefits that proficient bilingualism can provide. The issues facing Spanish-English bilinguals in the Los Angeles area are relevant to nearly every bi- and multilingual community irrespective of nation, language, and/or ethnicity.

"This book takes up the lens of ethnolinguistic communities as they proudly educate their own children in their ways of speaking and being. These bilingual community education programs are unlike bilingual programs in US public schools, where speakers of languages other than English are often minoritized. In these programs, the children's linguistic and cultural diversity are their most valuable assets. But these bilingual community education programs are also different from how others have characterized ???heritage language??? programs. In these bilingual community education programs diasporic ethnolinguistic communities ensure that their children use their ways of speaking and being within a US global context. Thus, their interest is not in their heritage, as the language and the culture was performed in the past, in another space, but as a dynamic bilingualism and biculturalism that is performed by American children."--publisher website.

Explores the processes of monolingual language development in pre-school children. Following an overview of child bilingualism, this book looks at the influence of the child's family environment and the factors which predict the language use of the child.

A general introduction to bilingualism, bilingual education, and minority education in the United States, and an ethnographic/discourse analytic study of how one successful dual-language programme challenges mainstream US educational progammes that discriminate against minority students and the languages they speak. Implications for research practice and practice in other school and community contexts are emphasized.

Countries in Africa, America, Asia and Europe provide the sociolinguistic contexts described in this volume. They involve settings where three or more languages are spoken and where speakers are trilingual. With the focus on family, school and the wider community, the book illustrates personal, social, cultural and political factors contributing to the acquisition and maintenance of trilingualism and highlights a rich pattern of trilingual language use.