RAISING CHILDREN BILINGUALLY THROUGH THE ‘ONE PARENT-ONE LANGUAGE’ APPROACH: A CASE STUDY OF JAPANESE MOTHERS IN THE AUSTRALIAN CONTEXT. Takeuchi

Abstract

RAISING CHILDREN BILINGUALLY THROUGH THE ‘ONE PARENT-ONE LANGUAGE’ APPROACH: A CASE STUDY OF JAPANESE MOTHERS IN THE AUSTRALIAN CONTEXT. Takeuchi. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. Pp. xv + 385. $68.95 paper.Research on child language acquisition within bilingual families adhering to the “One Parent-One Language” (OPOL) approach has focused on parental attitudes, language status (Romaine, 1989), the quantity of language input (Clyne, 1987; Schlyter, 1993), and the quality of parent-child interactions (Dopke, 1992; Lanza, 1997). Masae Takeuchi's work offers a valuable overview of this past research and reports on her own dissertation study of 25 OPOL families in Australia. Takeuchi adds to the growing body of data demonstrating that the quality of interactions between the minority-language-speaking parent and the child is often a crucial variable in determining the success of the OPOL approach in raising a child with active knowledge of more than one language.