Growing Up with Two Languages

This website is intended to accompany reading of the 4th edition of my book Growing Up with Two Languages, published by Routledge.

Growing Up with Two Languages provides a highly accessible account of the stages of language development, describes and evaluates the various systems and strategies that can be adopted and looks at the problems that can occur when a child is exposed to two language and cultures. Combining research-informed advice and the experience of parents raising children as speakers of a wide range of languages in every populated continent in the world, this book and its associated web material will answer questions, offer tried-and-tested strategies to keep children speaking a minority language, and provide material to enlist the support of the extended family, teachers and others. The perspective of adults who were themselves raised speaking more than one language is included. New to this edition is a chapter focusing on families raising children as speakers of indigenous and threatened languages as well as chapters for teachers and health professionals who want to know more about multilingual child language development and how they can support parents to continue speaking their language with their children. With new and updated first-hand advice, internet resources and examples throughout, this book also includes a chapter that introduces important recent research into multilingual children and further reading guides for those who want to know more. This book is for parents who are raising or plan to raise children as speakers of more than one language, and for the teachers and healthcare workers who meet and can support them.

Una Cunningham biography

I am currently Professor of English language education at the Department of Language Education at Stockholm University. I am also an Adjunct Professor at the School of Educational Studies and Leadership at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

My educational interests also concern technology-supported language learning and teaching. I have worked as an educator and researcher at universities in Sweden, Spain, Poland and New Zealand. I have been working for many years in the field of language education and have conducted research on English language teaching as well as multilingualism at home, school and preschool. I am editor-in-chief of the Journal of Home Language Research, and have worked intensively to create research-based information for parents of multilingual children and professionals who meet multilingual families.

My husband, Staffan Andersson, and I raised our four children to speak English and Swedish in Sweden. We later moved to New Zealand for five years. My personal web page is http://unacunningham.com

Bilingual teens in New Zealand

These audio clips are from interviews with parents and teenagers from bilingual households in Christchurch, New Zealand, carried out for the Intergenerational Transmission of Minority Languages (ITML) project. ITML was led by my colleague Jeanette King and myself, Una Cunningham, and ran at the University of Canterbury between 2014 and 2017. The project studied the extent to which speakers of minority languages in New Zealand are passing their language on to their children. The phrase ‘minority language’ is used here to mean languages other than the three protected languages of New Zealand: English, Māori and New Zealand Sign Language.

The ‘bilingual teens’ section of the project, with funding from the New Zealand Institute of Language, Brain and Behaviour, focused on the experiences of parents and their teenage children in situations where intergenerational transmission has been successful. The data sources for the ‘bilingual teens’ ITML project are twofold: recent census data on the number of child speakers and interviews with parents and their minority language speaking teenagers. Information from both sources allowed the ITML project to address the deficits in current knowledge about bilingualism in New Zealand, by creating workshops and presentations for parents and relevant professional bodies.

One of the initial motivations for the ITML project was a report from the Office of Ethnic Affairs where it was suggested that migrant families should consider speaking English to their children to improve their level of English. Our concern was that advice such as this may encourage migrant families to abandon intergenerational language transmission without considering the long-term personal and societal benefits of competence in the heritage language. It is also worth noting that in comparison with other jurisdictions there is a dearth of public understanding and knowledge about multilingualism in New Zealand and a lack of information for professionals working with parents and children.

This project was ably assisted by a team of colleagues, research assistants and summer scholars: Anneke a Campo (Dutch), Lia de Vocht (Dutch), Novia Bin (Chinese), Diane Fletcher (French), Julia Hinrichs (German), Jean Kim (Korean), Aline Taylor (French), Marie-Ève Therrien (French), Carolina Tornero Martos (Spanish).

Publications from the project

Cunningham, U., & King, J. (2018). Language, ethnicity, and belonging for the children of migrants in New Zealand. SAGE Open, 8(2). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244018782571
Cunningham, U., & King, J. (2019). Greening the information desert: Supporting emergent bilinguals with research-informed workshops. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 42(1), 37–58. https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.17055.cun
King, J., & Cunningham, U. (2017). Tamariki and fanau: Child speakers of Māori and Samoan in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Te Reo, 60, 27–44. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1236472/FULLTEXT01.pdf
King, J., & Cunningham, U. (2016). Intergenerational transmission of minority languages in New Zealand: Methodological issues. In S. Grucza, M. Olpińska-Szkiełko & P. Romanowski (Eds.), Advances in understanding multilingualism: A global perspective (pp. 61–77). Frankfurt: Peter Lang Verlag.