Many bilingual and trilingual families get increasingly nervous as the 4+ assessments approach. The prospect of their multilingual child being grilled in English by a native speaker — and the richness of their budding vocabulary being evaluated on the basis of their answer to questions such as what is the colour of your mom’s hair*–is undoubtedly daunting. For many such families the approach of the 4+ marks a shift in priorities. They start to doubt themselves. During the first years of the child’s life, they have often devoted a significant amount of time and energy to embedding their mother tongue(s) in the child. Perhaps they have hired a nanny who speaks the “minority” language(s), opted for a bilingual nursery, spent the bulk of their holiday “back home” or invested in a large collection of books and DVDs in the language(s). In these committed early years, many parents...