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.
Whereas parents from different language backgrounds often adopt the OPOL approach with the hope that their children will be able to speak both parental languages, the success of the OPOL approach varies, especially with relation to children's proficiency in the minority language (Kasuya, 1998). Taking this variability as a starting point, Takeuchi's volume begins with a comprehensive review of previous research, outlining the findings related to both successful and unsuccessful cases of bilingual parenting. Her review highlights the lack of past research investigating bilingual language development into middle childhood, the crucial point when children often enter school in the majority language. To address this gap, Takeuchi investigates this middle childhood period and focuses on the nature and impact of parental input and discourse strategies among Japanese-Australian OPOL families.
Takeuchi's work is strengthened by her use of both quantitative and qualitative methods. She conducted semistructured interviews with 25 Japanese mothers married to English-monolingual Australian men raising their children bilingually and then carried out detailed case studies of four mothers and their children by collecting audio recordings of interactions in the home. Through her macro- and micro-level analyses, Takeuchi illuminates the general correlations in her dataset as well as the processes that support them.
She finds that only 5 out of the 25 mothers interviewed report continued use of the minority language by their children; thus, few children exposed to the OPOL approach “actively spoke Japanese with their Japanese mothers into middle childhood” (p. 357). However, Takeuchi argues that the minority language-speaking parent, in this case Japanese mothers in the Australian context, can promote active bilingualism through their interactions with their children. By analyzing the characteristics of the mothers' speech, Takeuchi identifies the following as indicative of success: the mother's determination to teach Japanese to her child, the mother's consistency with the use of Japanese, the interactional features and sensitivity of the mother's speech that allow the child's participation and interest, and the maintenance of activities in Japanese.
Takeuchi also finds that the shift toward English for the 20 unsuccessful cases of OPOL did not necessarily coincide with the child's entry into English-speaking/monolingual school systems but that the timing of this shift toward English varied across children. Furthermore, she finds that additional factors, such as extra input from other sources, the extent of contacts with other Japanese speakers, and the frequency of trips to Japan did not substitute for regular shared conversations between the Japanese mother and the child. Additionally, these factors did not predict the level of success in the child's Japanese language development, although they “did seem to help to prompt continuous development in Japanese” over time (p. 359).
These findings, along with many others from Takeuchi's study, are outlined in the helpful section summaries provided throughout. Although the level of detail makes it a rather dense read at points, these concise chapter summaries serve as a useful reference for general audience readers. Moreover, researchers new to the study of OPOL families will benefit from reading Takeuchi's meticulous reports about past research in the field as well as the details concerning her own methodology and findings.
One final issue worth mentioning is the possible generalizability of her results to other contexts, languages, and family types. It would be interesting to see if the relatively limited successes reported in this volume also hold true in other OPOL situations. Takeuchi has provided us with an informative and thorough overview of the OPOL approach and her own study of Japanese-Australian families, with interesting implications for families attempting to raise their children bilingually and also for future research in the field.
