Raising Bilingual-Biliterate Children in Monolingual Cultures

by Stephen J Caldas

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781853598753
Publisher:	Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Publication date:	04/06/2006
Series:	Bilingual Education & Bilingualism , #57
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	5.85(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

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 UniversityPress). His research interests include psycholinguistics, socio/psychometrics, desegregation and the social/political contexts of education.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction and Focus of the Book

Rearing children in two monolingual environments to be simultaneous biliterate-bilinguals who will speak their two languages with native-like fluency is a big challenge. The author and his wife experienced the challenge first hand, rearing three children from the cradle to young adulthood to be fluent French-English bilinguals who are functionally biliterate. Additionally, the children speak the target dialects of their languages with native-like fluency. In other words, maternal speakers of their varieties of French and English are likely to identify the children as native speakers of the language as well. What we have done is not at all unusual. Literally millions (perhaps even billions) of families have reared bilingual and even trilingual children (Romaine, 1995), and research studies have documented the many psycho-social dimensions of children acquiring multiple languages simultaneously (De Houwer, 1990; Deuchar & Quay, 2000; Fantini, 1985; Leopold, 1949; Okita, 2002; Ronjat, 1913; Saunders, 1982, 1988). What makes our experience unique is that we artificially orchestrated both the strategies, and to the extent possible, even the children's environments to ensure the success of our project. Additionally, we carefully documented our progress using a variety of research instruments and methodologies, including audiotape and videotape recordings, author constructed teacher and child French competency surveys, interviews with teachers, ethnographic fieldnotes, psychological and diagnostic testing, and standardized assessment instruments. This book draws from all of these sources to organize, present, analyze, and finally theorize about the process of rearing bilingual and biliterate children in two monolingual cultures through late adolescence. What we discovered in some instances validates existing linguistic theory, and in other cases squarely contradicts current conceptions about how, why, and when children learn to read, write, and speak two languages.

The vast majority of the world's multilinguals speak more than one language because of the circumstances of their lives. Most learned their languages effortlessly. Where parents have had to exert effort to ensure their children learned two languages, success has not been automatic (Okita, 2002). Had we made no efforts to ensure that our children learned to read, write, and speak two languages, they would likely be monolinguals like most American children, though perhaps able to speak a few French words and phrases, and recognize some written French. What I would like to do in this book is describe and analyze our very deliberate family bilingual-biliteracy project so that others might benefit from our experience, as well as to expand the body of research on what bilingual strategies work and why.

Based on our scientifically documented experience, I am able to validate certain specific strategies, which when carefully planned and faithfully executed, help in the formation of biliterate-bilingual children in the context of a monolingual society. This does not mean that such an endeavor would be easy for all families in all circumstances. In fact, given the very particular circumstances of our family's two social contexts, which are not typical of many immigrants around the world, some of the specifics of the strategies we employed would not be directly applicable or reproducible in other families. Still, many of the general principles that we validated, clarified, or discovered, would apply to most children in most families. Our project was in essence an extended social science laboratory experiment. There were costs and sacrifices associated with carrying out our project that some families either cannot or will not make. However, we were motivated by science in ways that would not move most families to action.

Depending upon the family and the specific environment, some costs to ensure that children become fluent biliterate-bilinguals can be very high indeed (Okita, 2002). It is also true, though, that the fruit of such an effort is priceless. To paraphrase a French saying: 'Une personne qui parle deux langues vaux deux personnes' (A person who speaks two languages is worth two persons).

In the Beginning ...

As important as a school foreign language immersion program could be to reviving and perpetuating an endangered tongue, an even more effective strategy is to pass along the tongue in the child's first, and for a time, most important social milieu – the family. Study after study has validated the critical importance of learning a language in infancy if one is to learn the language with native like-fluency and annunciation. Our studies, too, have validated this linguistic reality. However, few studies have followed up on infant bilinguals to see what happens linguistically to these children as they move into, through, and out of adolescence. Do their language skills degrade? Can they 'forget' one of their two languages? How do they perceive their bilingualism? How does peer pressure affect their propensity to speak the minority language? Are they proud of the fact they can speak two languages, or do they hide this extraordinary ability?

These pages carefully document our family project to rear three bilingual-biliterate children in two different cultures – essentially monolingual English-speaking Louisiana, and totally monolingual French-speaking Québec. Importantly, the majority of our children's time, especially in their most linguistically formative years, was spent in English-speaking Louisiana. As a native French-speaking Canadian, and a native English-speaking American, my wife and I struggled to learn each other's language while in our twenties, long after the time acknowledged by neurobiologists and child psychologists to be the optimal period for second language acquisition. Being educators, and later researchers as well, we knew the importance of early socialization in learning anything fluently, including languages. So we started the linguistic socialization process from the first day in each of our children's lives.

The critical importance of early language acquisition was poignantly driven home to us in a single incident that ultimately proved to be the spark for this book. We were starry-eyed newlyweds, crossing the English Channel that separated the two countries that gave birth to our respective mother tongues. While idly observing a three-year-old boy happily playing between his two seated parents on the gently rocking ferry, our attention was drawn to the curious conversation taking place between the mother, who spoke to her child in English, and the father, who was addressing him in French. The young child would answer the mother in English, then immediately turn to the father and speak to him in French. My wife and I exchanged wide-eyed glances. After all, we were barely beyond the phase in our relationship where we had worn out well-thumbed French-English dictionaries in romantically inspired efforts to understand each other. But here, before us, was a child who could not have been speaking for much more than a year, if that long, and yet he had already mastered two entirely different linguistic systems!

We believe that the flash of inspiration struck us at that wondrous, 'teachable moment'. We decided to rear our yet-to-be-born offspring in exactly the way this Frenchman and his English wife appeared to be rearing their child. Before we reached Calais, it was settled: I would only speak English to our progeny, and my wife would only speak French. This is more formally known as the 'one parent, one language' approach (Döpke, 1992). Thus was born our project, which after 19 years of continuous, concerted, and conscientious effort, and some duly documented modification, is essentially completed. Our three children are fluent French-English biliterate-bilinguals, who indeed speak both languages with more facility than either of the authors (Caldas & Caron-Caldas, 1992, 1997, 1999, 2000, 2002).

It is important to clarify up-front that even before our children were born we had determined to rear them to speak Québécois French and American English with native-like fluency. That is, we agreed to employ whatever strategies we could to ensure that our children learned to speak each dialect like monolingual speakers of these respective languages. Both my wife and I had identifiable accents in our second tongues, and we wanted to rear our children to speak both of their languages without our 'linguistic markers'. Perhaps our goal was unrealistic, misplaced, or even naive, but it was still an explicit goal we both shared. The study of accents – how they are acquired, changed, and lost – is a legitimate field of study in linguistics (Moyer, 2004). More than scientific, though, ours was originally a personal goal. On the one hand, we wanted the children to be able to speak so well in either tongue that native speakers of their respective dialects couldn't tell they weren't natives. But as a social scientist, I was (and remain) quite interested in how the children's environments were influencing their developing accents. I had also intended to gauge the accomplishment of this objective, but discovered some years into the project that my instruments were too imprecise and impressionistic, and I didn't really have the linguistic expertise to apply the proper measures.

However, since the issue of 'accents' reared its head continuously, in ways I'll describe in this book, I could not ignore it. Indeed, the children themselves raised the issue so often that avoiding a discussion of 'accents' would result in an incomplete picture of our family project. Moreover, I discovered that there truly is an 'impressionistic', subjective dimension to how individuals perceive accents. Thus, rather than treating the issue of accent acquisition from a morphological perspective, that is, measuring precisely how the children were pronouncing French and English words at various times, this study approaches the issue sociolinguistically. I try to longitudinally document the following: (1) how we the parents, friends and family perceived the children's changing accents, (2) how the children's francophone teachers in Louisiana and Québec perceived the children's accents, and (3) how the children themselves perceived their own accents and how their attitudes towards having an accent changed over time. What I discovered about 'perceptions' seems worthy of reporting in and of itself, regardless the 'reality'. My own perceptions of accents changed over the course of this project, as I came to understand just how subjective this dimension of speech really seems to be: we don't all hear each other the same way.

Our having chosen to rear children who speak French and English like native, monolingual speakers is in no way meant to imply that those who speak accented versions of a language (like my French, for example) speak an inferior version of the language. We were, quite simply, interested in determining what factors account for an individual's learning to speak two languages simultaneously like a native. According to Ada and Baker (2001), only a minority of bilinguals achieve this level of bilingualism, and we wanted to know why this was the case.

I wholeheartedly subscribe to Zentella's (2004) emphasis on the importance of diversity and inclusion, acknowledging that one does not need to speak a 'standard' or 'unaccented' version of a language to either be considered bilingual, or to have one's membership in a social group validated. Three of my four grandparents spoke English with an accent influenced by another tongue (Portuguese and French), yet all were American citizens who were quite proud of this fact. I consider it absolutely reprehensible to discriminate against any individual for the way they speak (or do not speak) any language. I share Zentella's (2004: xi) concerns that:

... if we judge our proficiency in either of our languages against an unrealistic monolingual norm, inevitably we find ourselves wanting. For many members of ethnolinguistic minorities in the United States, whose ability to speak two languages may be the only advantage they enjoy over English monolinguals, debilitating feelings of linguistic insecurity can affect the development of their home language and of English, as well as their academic progress.

'Debilitating feelings of linguistic insecurity' describes well the psychological injury left behind in the wake of intolerance towards French-speaking Cajuns in Louisiana. Sensitive to my ancestors' tragic history, I recognize that the task of trying to rear perfectly bilingual children does not necessarily entail rearing children who speak the target language exactly like a native. Again I reiterate: We undertook this goal in part as a scientific experiment, curious which factors we would have to manipulate to achieve our pre-specified objectives, one of which was rearing children to speak two languages like monolingual native speakers.

Ensuring that the children learned to read, write, and speak English turned out to be the easy part for us. Actually, it was almost effortless on our part. This is in spite of the fact, as we will discuss in Chapter 4, that English would be spoken with much less frequency in our home than was French for the most formative part of our children's lives. Even given the emphasis placed on French in our home, periodic French language immersion in Québec, and the glorification of our French-speaking heritage in every milieu in which our children have lived and gone to school, none of these influences have been stronger than the children's adolescent peer cultures. This became painfully clear to us when we asked our son, who is two years older than our identical twin girls, if he spoke French with other French-speaking students in his American middle school. John's answer was an unequivocal, flat, 'no'. His reason? 'It's not cool' (age 11;10). Chapter 8 delves into the dynamics of early adolescence on the children's changing language preferences.

To us, one point became increasingly clear: in spite of our best efforts to Gallicize him, our son was turning out to be a pretty typical all-American boy, albeit a clandestinely bilingual one while around his American peers (during middle school, anyway). During the same time-frame that our son let us know that French-speaking was not 'cool' at his school, our twin girls, who had been in an elementary school French immersion program for the previous three years, not only spoke significantly more French at home, but had a decidedly more favorable attitude toward bilingualism than did our son (Caldas et al., 1998). We credited their staunch 'Parlez Français!' retorts to his taunting 'English! English! English!' outbursts to their school French immersion program – of which John attended for only one semester. We were in for a surprise.

Two years later, much to our mutual chagrin, we watched the twins adopt almost wholesale their brother's indifference and at times even hostile attitude toward French speaking in the Louisiana context, especially around their French-immersion peers (Caldas & Caron-Caldas, 2000). Thus, we began to soberly reassess the limits of a school language immersion program, especially when it came up against adolescence in America. We discuss our children's school French-immersion experiences in Chapter 6, and draw several salient lessons from our observations, some of which run counter to scholarly thinking about these programs.

However, before the reader concludes, quite wrongly, that English won the day, our study included a second, non-English-speaking milieu: French-speaking Québec, Canada. It was in this decidedly non-anglophone environment that we saw our children put aside their English, hide it even–and pick up the French standard. Moreover, they continued to wave this French-speaking, fleur de lis standard just as vigorously, if not more so, as they moved into and through adolescence. Indeed, it was due to Québec that we were able to confirm beyond any measure of doubt that our experiment to raise perfectly biliterate-bilingual children had succeeded. Still, we once again have to give the children's peers – francophone in this case – much more credit for influencing John, Valerie, and Stephanie's linguistic behavior than we, the parents, had over our children during adolescence.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Raising Bilingual–Biliterate Children in Monolingual Cultures"
by .
Copyright © 2006 Stephen J. Caldas.
Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1: Introduction and Focus of The Book

Chapter 2: Bilingualism in America

Chapter 3: Methodology: Taking The Measure of The Project

Chapter 4: Bilingual Antecedents

Chapter 5: Home and Community

Chapter 6: The School

Chapter 7: Recreational Reading, Media, Hobbies & Games

Chapter 8: The Psychology of Pre- and Early Adolescent Bilingualism

Chapter 9: The Psychology of Middle Adolescent Bilingualism

Chapter 10: Emerging Bilinguistic Identities

Chapter 11: Taking the Measure of Bilingualism

Chapter 12: Lessons Learned, Broader Implications, and Guidelines for Parents

Bibliography

Appendix

Editorial Reviews

Through the highly praised success story of his own family project on rearing bilingual and biliterate children in monolingual sociocultural contexts, Caldas weaves rich personal experiences with nuanced theoretical insight and rigorous analysis to examine the relationship between bilingual proficiency and academic achievement. This beautifully written work illustrates the power of the family, school, community, and peer group in shaping children’s linguistic abilities and sensitizes the reader to profound lessons surrounding bilingualism and the politics of bilingual education. Min Zhou, Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Asian American Studies,

Los Angeles University of California

This book reminds us of the value, benefits, and need for bilinguals in our society, and it shows how we can pass on our multiple heritages in the home in a positive manner, even while political policies fail to support languages in our schools and elsewhere. In this sense, this research provides an important example that can help parents and others find the way.

Alvino E. Fantini

Through the highly praised success story of his own family project on rearing bilingual and biliterate children in monolingual sociocultural contexts, Caldas weaves rich personal experiences with nuanced theoretical insight and rigorous analysis to examine the relationship between bilingual proficiency and academic achievement. This beautifully written work illustrates the power of the family, school, community, and peer group in shaping children’s linguistic abilities and sensitizes the reader to profound lessons surrounding bilingualism and the politics of bilingual education. Min Zhou, Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Asian American Studies,

Los Angeles Universityof California

The study provides excellent insight into a number of factors affecting familial bilingualism and raising children who are bilingual and biliterate. It is commendable that Caldas is willing to share his family’s experiences in such detail, as the study is a valuable contribution to the field of bilingualism.

Arizona State University in Linguist List 18.1036 Kara McAlister

This is a beautifully written book about an extraordinary experiment—successfully raising three children French-English bilingual in an English-speaking world. I was kept on the edge of my seat for the entire spell-binding account of the ups and downs of this 18 year experiment and rewarded by its triumphant finish. I am as much in awe of the book and the family, and captivated by the story, as I would be if this had been about their scaling Mt. Everest.

Christine H. Rossell

A successful example of a mixed-methods approach to longitudinal research, this book presents a comprehensive study of the development of biliteracy and bilingual proficiency that accounts thoroughly for the combined influences of home, school, and community. Steve Caldas succinctly illustrates how evolving bilingual identities fluctuate as they interact to varying degrees with age, geographical setting, and peer versus parental influences. A pleasure to read from beginning to end, this is one of those books that's hard to put down. While the narrative unfolds as an intriguing tale of the trials and tribulations of striving to raise bilingual children mainly in the US, it provides thought-provoking data allowing the reader to confront a range of theoretical perspectives. The narrative's happy ending is certainly an added bonus.

Roy Lyster

Through the highly praised success story of his own family project on rearing bilingual and biliterate children in monolingual sociocultural contexts, Caldas weaves rich personal experiences with nuanced theoretical insight and rigorous analysis to examine the relationship between bilingual proficiency and academic achievement. This beautifully written work illustrates the power of the family, school, community, and peer group in shaping children's linguistic abilities and sensitizes the reader to profound lessons surrounding bilingualism and the politics of bilingual education.
Min Zhou, Professor and Founding Chair of the Department of Asian American Studies,

Los Angeles University of California

Caldas' book is a great bilingual acquisition book that provides a valuable text for a college-level course on bilingual development.

Natasha Ringblom

The study provides excellent insight into a number of factors affecting familial bilingualism and raising children who are bilingual and biliterate. It is commendable that Caldas is willing to share his family’s experiences in such detail, as the study is a valuable contribution to the field of bilingualism.

Arizona State Universityin Linguist List 18.1036 Kara McAlister