Raising Bilingual-Biliterate Children in Monolingual Cultures

This book is a case study carefully detailing the French/English bilingual and biliterate development of three children in one family beginning with their births and ending in late adolescence. The author and researcher is the children’s French/English bilingual American father, who was aided by his bilingual French Canadian wife (also the children’s mother). We reared our three children in two different cultures— essentially monolingual English-speaking Louisiana, and totally monolingual French-speaking Québec. The family spent academic years in Louisiana, and the summer months in Québec. Our strategy was to speak only French to our son and our identical twin daughters. We artificially orchestrated and manipulated both the strategies, and to the extent possible, even the children’s environments to ensure the success of our project. Additionally, I carefully documented our progress using a variety of research tools, including audio and videotape recordings, teacher and child surveys, interviews with teachers, fieldnotes, psychological and diagnostic testing, and standardized assessment instruments.

Stephen J. Caldas is professor of educational foundations and leadership at the University of Louisiana—Lafayette. He has co-authored three previous books (with Carl L. Bankston III) including the just published book Forced to Fail: The Paradox of School Desegregation (published by Praeger in 2005), and A Troubled Dream: The Promise and Failure of School Desegregation in Louisiana (2002, Vanderbilt University Press). His research interests include psycholinguistics, socio/psychometrics, desegregation and the social/political contexts of education.