Bilingual development by children of immigrant families : what parents and teachers should know?

More and more children from immigrant families are becoming bilinguals by exposure to two languages in a context-bound bilingual situation. However, most previous studies on childhood bilingualism only investigate how children develop two languages with the one parent-one language strategy. Parents of these bilingual children usually have different native languages from each other, and each parent speaks his or her own language to the child. This paper discusses how children of immigrant families develop two languages in the one environment-one language situation, where neither parent is a native speaker of the mainstream language. Research activities and findings from the Bilingualism Research Laboratory of Western Sydney University and Jinan University are reported. The research has implications for parents and teachers on how to raise and educate the children from immigrant families bilingually.