This book focuses on the One Parent One Language or One Person One Language approach and covers issues that can come up when using this approach in some detail. The material is based on questionnaire results and follow up interviews with a large number of parents in multilingual families. It starts off with a short section of the history of OPOL and examples of its very early use, but after this short intro it is very practical and is clearly focused on issues that often concern parents or where decisions need to be made. In most cases it details the strategies that the interviewees have taken and offers parents specific advice or options. Although many of the issues covered are covered in many books, this book does look from the perspective of a mixed language/OPOL family and it will probably be most relevant to families in this situation. (There is almost always some fluity in approach and several families moved away from OPOL at some point so as to reinforce a weaker language so the book includes examples of this.) There are some issues that are particular to OPOL families .e.g. it has one of the most detailed considerations that I have read of the situation where one parent doesn’t understand a language that the other parent is using to speak to the child(ren).

My only regret about this book it that it seems to assume that women are the main carers in all cases and her set of interviewees also seemed to have some strange gender biases (for example, in her sample almost all the men lived in their home countries whereas almost all of the women had travelled to live in a new country, this is not our experience at WFBG).

I would strongly recommend this book to any members of OPOL families.