Raising Bilingual-Biliterate Children in Monolingual Cultures
Caldas, S.J.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.
2006

Reviewed by: Soria Colomer
University of Georgia

Raising Bilingual-Biliterate Children in Monolingual Cultures provides a carefully documented account of raising French-English bilingual children from infancy through late adolescence. Useful for parents wishing to raise bilingual children as well as bilingual researchers and students of second language acquisition, this book has a wide range of potential audiences. The text is well-written, engaging, and timely as bilingual parenting becomes more common in the U.S. and among bilingual, bi-national families. Stephen Caldas’ inviting tone, leaves the reader feeling as if they have been long-time friends of the Caldas family. The key theoretical concepts that are meticulously integrated throughout the book make it an ideal supplementary text for a course in second language acquisition, family language planning, and related fields. Throughout the book, Caldas continuously credits his wife, Suzanne, and children, John, Stephanie, and Valerie, as significant collaborators without whom he could not have conducted the study. In the preface, Fred Genesee of McGill University notes that the strength of this book is its focus on peer influence, cultural context, and the construction of language related identities during adolescence.

In the first chapter, Caldas introduces the book by summarizing the study. He first acknowledges that many families raise bilingual/multilingual children; however, the project he and his wife developed, implemented, and documented distinguished his family from the average bilingual family. Since before their children were born, Caldas and his wife devised a plan in which they would employ strategies and manipulate environments to ensure that their children spoke Québécois French and American English while being raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and later in Lafayette, Louisiana in the U.S. Not only did they want their children to be bilingual, they envisioned balanced bilinguals with native-like fluency and accents who were completely biliterate and bicultural.

Caldas approaches accents from a sociolinguistic perspective and not a morphological stance. The nineteen year longitudinal study uses a mixed methods approach and focuses on how his children’s accents are perceived by family, friends, teachers, and his children. Few studies exist that follow children throughout adolescence; having done so, Caldas records the power of peer pressure and its affects on identity and language use. Had he not made a conscious effort to raise bilingual-biliterate children, Caldas believes John, Stephanie, and Valerie would essentially be monolingual speakers; nevertheless, he uses this book as a forum to describe the secrets of his project’s success.

In the second chapter, Caldas provides a brief history of bilingualism in the U.S. and examines the xenophobic and nativist attitudes that have plagued Americans since before the Declaration of Independence. He notes that a common language is an important national asset; however, he worries people may equate becoming proficient in English with having to abandon their non-English native language. He establishes a link between multilingualism and higher cognitive functioning to encourage educators and policy makers to support bilingualism in schools. As Louisiana is the only state that is officially French-English bilingual, Caldas credits the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL) for its role in preserving the French Cajun culture in Louisiana. Moreover, he notes that CODOFIL models how government language policies can indeed help save endangered languages.

The third chapter documents the methodology of this participant-observation case study where quantitative measures are used to support qualitative findings. Although Caldas informs readers this chapter can be skipped, it serves as an academic tool for novice researchers. The chapter provides a step-by-step approach to research implementation.

In chapter four, the reader is treated to a love story of how the author and his wife met. It is pertinent to the context of the study because he uses the experiences of his learning French and his wife’s learning English as the foundation for raising bilingual-biliterate children. He recounts watching a baby respond in English to his mother and French to his father on a ferry as he and his wife crossed the English Channel as newlyweds. They were amazed at how the boy had mastered two different linguistic systems while Caldas and his wife were still thumbing through dictionaries to understand each other.

In chapter five, Caldas describes how the study began with the birth of his first child, John, and initiatives taken to raise a bilingual-biliterate child. Although he and his wife had implemented the one-parent-one-language approach during John’s infancy, he and his wife noticed that his wife’s French was not enough French input for his son since they lived in an English environment. Thus, they adopted a French only approach when his son turned eighteen months. When his twin daughters were born two years later, they continued to employ the French only policy at home. Consequently, this study also compares language acquisition of an individual child to that of twins.

In addition to the ‘birth’ of the project, this chapter details the history of the Acadians and the Cajun French spoken in the region of Acadiana, Louisiana. Caldas acknowledges that raising bilingual-bilterate children coincided with his efforts to maintain the Cajun culture of his ancestors. Caldas and his wife took proactive measures in reaching their goal by purchasing a cottage in Québec where they spent all their summer vacations with their children. Caldas describes how people’s perception of French-English bilingualism in the different communities of Louisiana and Québec affected their children’s ‘language preference,’ noting the effects of peer pressure on the children’s language choices.

In chapter six Caldas notes that as educators he and his wife both had high academic standards in choosing the schools their children would attend. Caldas details challenges they faced in selecting an ideal schooling environment. He provides insight as to how public, non-public, monolingual, and bilingual education affected his children’s academic and bilingual language formation. He also describes the effects two three-week sessions in the Québec public school system had on his children’s French. Moreover, he documents the ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ factors motivating his children to speak French and how their surroundings affected their accents.

In chapter seven, Caldas notes the effects of having read to his children in French and English in their infancy and their early childhood. He indicates how he and his wife used this technique and others to link academics and pleasure in their young children’s psyches. Furthermore, he describes how certain actions, such as limiting television to French programs, helped to create a French literacy rich environment. Likewise, he models how a parent can take advantage of their children’s enthusiasm for comics to foster French acquisition. However, he notes the challenges of using French when discussing the emerging vocabulary of technology and that of other hobbies he shared with his children.

The eighth chapter is especially useful for teachers and parents who seek to understand the mindset of bilingual preteens and teenagers. The effects of peer pressure were both positive and negative on the adolescents’ language choice and depended upon their linguistic societal contexts. In chapter nine, Caldas examines the intensifying role of peer pressure in middle adolescence. While in a French-speaking environment, the teens’ French use increased significantly; yet, peer pressure had a detrimental effect to French use in Louisiana. Additionally, Caldas identifies how societal perception of accent affects both identity and language use. At the end of this teenage period, the author notes his son and daughters’ spontaneous use of French in Anglophone surroundings.

In chapter ten, Caldas describes how his mid to late adolescent children seem to be successfully identifying with their two cultural and linguistic halves. In the summer of 2003, John is eighteen and leaves home to attend an out-of-state university and the twins, who are sixteen, leave to attend a school for advanced students after working full-time at a French-speaking summer camp as counselors. This chapter includes an analysis and comparison of both the pre- and late adolescent bilingual self-perceptions of the children captured by the author constructed “Bilingual Self-perception Survey.” Inclusion of his children’s responses provides a vivid account of the challenges they faced in creating their bilingual-biliterate identities.

In chapter eleven, the author provides an in-depth quantitative analysis of the children’s bilingualism, a tremendous resource for student-researchers learning to construct quantitative studies. It provides a statistical analysis of the “Bilingual Preference Ratio” Caldas developed to measure the quantity of French and English words used by Caldas, his wife and their three children. In addition, twenty administrations to each child of Edelman’s Contextualized Measure of Degree of Bilingualism are examined in each of the following domains: home, neighborhood, and school. Lastly, it quantitatively analyzes responses provided by his children and his children’s French teachers to the Likert-scale items on the French proficiency survey.

In the twelfth and final chapter Caldas applauds French immersion programs in Louisiana, but credits his children’s success to the authentic language input obtained during time spent in Québec and in a French-only environment at home. In conclusion, he affirms the benefits of completing such a project were well worth the costs since, “Une personne qui parle deux langes vaux deux personnes.”