The purpose of this edited work is to provide a comprehensive overview of research methods on bilingualism and multilingualism. This is an important contribution because, to my knowledge, no other book that concentrates on this subject matter has been published.

This book is divided into three parts. Part 1 serves as an introduction to conducting research on bilingualism and multilingualism (note that the contributing authors use these terms interchangeably). In chapter 1, Wei comprehensively describes the research themes that underlie the linguistic, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic research perspectives on bilingualism. Chapter 2 (Moyer) takes the readers through the usual steps of conducting research, from selecting a topic to presenting the results.

Part 2 includes chapters that examine various methods of data collection and analysis. Chapter 3 (Nortier) provides an overview of the types and sources of bilingual data, focusing on codeswitching. In chapter 4, Gardner-Chloros explains the different levels by which bilingual data can be classified (e.g., lexical, syntactic, phonological, and morphological). In chapter 5, Lanza discusses the importance of sociolinguistic parameters when selecting individual participants or groups of participants and research sites (e.g., home or school). Chapters 6–8 focus on psycholinguistic research and provide an overview of experimental designs (e.g., cross-sectional, longitudinal, case study, and group) and laboratory designs (e.g., Stroop tasks, lexical decision, eye tracking, and positron emission tomography). The rest of the chapters in Part 2—except chapter 12, which is on statistics—describe methods of data collection and analysis commonly used in descriptive research. These chapters focus on interviews and questionnaires, audio and video, transcription, corpora, ethnobiographic research, social network analysis (i.e., how the social relationships of the speakers affect their language practices), conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, narrative analysis, and media analysis (i.e., how bilinguals are portrayed in the media).

Part 3, written by the editors, is designed to be a practical guide to conducting research: It contains bilingualism project ideas from linguistic, psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, educational, and interdisciplinary perspectives. The editors also describe the resources for research on bilingualism (e.g., journals, books, conferences, research tools, and Web sites) and provide suggestions on disseminating such research through presentations and publications.

The main strength of this work is that it provides a comprehensive overview of research methods on bilingualism. The overview of each research method is very brief and clear; thus, this book is appropriate for beginning students of bilingualism. This volume will also be helpful to new researchers in the fields of linguistics, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics who are beginning to conduct their own research on bilingualism. However, additional resources presented in each chapter need to be explored to understand fully the various research methods explained in this work. Another strength is this book’s call for interdisciplinary research. The editors promote this call themselves by combining various research methods throughout this book and providing research ideas for interdisciplinary work on bilingualism.

One weakness of this volume is that it does not clearly state in the introductory chapter what is meant by the term bilingual. Wei says that bilinguals are those who can communicate in more than one language either orally or through writing, but he does not state whether communication ability has to be nativelike. The issues with defining bilingualism have been discussed previously: Proficiency level is often a major difference in the existing definitions (Gass & Selinker, Reference Gass and Selinker2008; Marian, Reference Marian, Altarriba and Heredia2008). To avoid confusion regarding what, exactly, bilingualism is, the editors could have provided a comprehensive overview of the definitions of bilingualism used throughout this work as well as the field at large. Additionally, readers should be aware that the chapter ordering may not be optimal. For example, to enhance comprehension, it may be better to read chapter 12 on statistics before chapters 6–8, which describe statistics-laden experimental studies. Aside from these slight criticisms, this volume is, overall, an excellent resource for both students and researchers of bilingualism.