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About the author
David Worthy is a language acquisition researcher, parent educator, and the founder of the Bilingual Home Project, a consultancy that has helped over four thousand families in thirty seven countries design and implement home based bilingual strategies. After earning his master's degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, where his thesis examined the role of caregiver input quantity in early second-language development, he spent eight years as a language program coordinator for international schools in Singapore, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. During that time, he worked directly with hundreds of families navigating the gap between school language policy and home language reality families who had the motivation to raise bilingual children but lacked the practical framework to do so when neither parent spoke the target language natively.
His work has been featured in The Bilingual Family Newsletter, Language and Education, and Parenting Science, and he has delivered workshops for the International Association of Bilingual Education, the European Parents' Association, and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Worthy's research and advocacy focus on a single question that the existing literature has largely neglected: how does a family with no native speakers of the target language build an environment where a child can become genuinely bilingual? His answer the structured exposure model presented in this book draws on longitudinal case studies, controlled intervention data, and over a decade of real world application with families speaking English, Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, and Hindi at home.
He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and two children, who are being raised bilingual in English and Japanese despite the fact that neither parent spoke Japanese before beginning the journey. He is currently at work on his second book, The Monolingual Parent's Guide to Raising a Bilingual Child, forthcoming in 2027.
