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Foreword
This book is the first detailed study of the language development of a Mandarin-English bilingual child. It joins the growing body of international literature on bilingual language acquisition and is informed by an excellent knowledge of the literature of that field.
The sociolinguistic situation makes this is a very significant piece of research. Although in most immigrant societies, there are two different ways of systematically raising children bilingually—one parent/person, one language and (more commonly) different languages for different situations—most published literature focuses on the first type. Ruying Qi’s study has the second type as its context. That is, both parents speak Mandarin at home, but the away-from-home situation provides input in the national language, English.
Not only is Mandarin the most widely used L1 in the world, but Mandarin speakers are also immigrants in many other countries, especially ones where English is the national language or has some official status. For instance, by the time of the 2011 Australian Census, it is likely that Mandarin will be the most widely employed home language other than