Annick De Houwer is Professor of Language Acquisition and Multilingualism at the Universität Erfurt, Germany. Her book The Acquisition of Two Languages from Birth (Cambridge, 1990) constituted pioneering work in bilingual acquisition, and her 2009 textbooks Bilingual First Language Acquisition and An Introduction to Bilingual Development are used all over the world. Lourdes Ortega is Professor of Second Language Acquisition at Georgetown University, Washington DC. A widely published scholar, she is best known for her award-winning meta-analysis of L2 instruction in 2000, her best-seller textbook Understanding Second Language Acquisition (2009, translated into Mandarin in 2016), and for championing a bilingual turn in SLA.
'This is the most up-to-date collection of insights into bilingualism to appear over the past ten years. It represents a significant contribution to an all-embracing view of the many facets of bilingual research and should become foundation reading for all those intending to delve further into this exciting domain.' Hugo Baetens Beardsmore, Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, and Emeritus Professor of English and Bilingualism, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium 'A stunning and accessible compilation, anchored in expertise and courageous in charting the dynamic and evolving terrain of research on individual language acquisition and bilingualism. Bravo to the editors for their inclusive and lifespan approach to language learning, use and unlearning and their willingness to encourage scrutiny of long-held beliefs about bilingualism, monolingualism and language.' Nancy H. Hornberger, University of Pennsylvania 'The editors of this Handbook have done a tremendous job in offering readers an exceptionally broad spectrum of views on phenomena of individual bilingualism across the life span: A wealth of well-structured information and new insights, timely and truly refreshing, even for established researchers.' Jan Hulstijn, Universiteit van Amsterdam