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The teenage years are a fascinating time in the life of any family, but what happens when the challenges of parenting teenagers are combined with the desire to help your children build on their multilingual abilities? In this follow-up to Growing up with Three Languages: Birth to Eleven, Xiao-lei Wang offers a unique insight into the dynamics of a multilingual family. She combines practical, evidence-based advice with rich detail from observations of her own family to offer support and inspiration on an aspect of multilingual parenting that has received comparatively little attention. By placing language within the wider context of teenagers'cognitive and social development, this book will enable parents everywhere to help and guide their children through the next step in their multilingual journey.

This book is a guide for parents who wish to raise children with more than one language and literacy. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, as well as the experiences of parents of multilingual children, this book walks parents through the multilingual reading and writing process from infancy to adolescence. It identifies essential literacy skills at each developmental stage and proposes effective strategies that facilitate multiliteracy, in particular, heritage-language literacy development in the home environment. This book can also be used as a reference for teachers who teach in community heritage language schools and in school heritage (or foreign) language programmes.

This book is based on an eleven-year observation of two children who were simultaneously exposed to three languages from birth. It tells the story of two parents from different cultural, linguistic, and ethnic-racial backgrounds who joined to raise their two children with their heritage languages outside their native countries. It also tells the children's story and the way they negotiated three cultures and languages and developed a trilingual identity. It sheds light on how parental support contributed to the children's simultaneous acquisition of three languages in an environment where the main input of the two heritage languages came respectively from the father and from the mother. It addresses the challenges and the unique language developmental characteristics of the two children during their trilingual acquisition process.