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Stephen J. Caldas, Raising bilingual-biliterate children in monolingual cultures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2007

Simona Montanari
Simona Montanari
Affiliation:
Child and Family Studies, California State University, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90032USA, smontan2@calstatela.edu
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Extract

Stephen J. Caldas, Raising bilingual-biliterate children in monolingual cultures. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. xvi, 231. Pb. $39.95.

This is the fascinating story of the author's own family project of raising his three children French-English bilingually in English-speaking Louisiana. Caldas, a French-English bilingual himself, and his bilingual French-Canadian wife artificially orchestrate and manipulate the children's environments from birth to adolescence to ensure that the children develop full bilingual proficiency and biliteracy in French and English. Caldas's and his wife's main strategy is to speak only French to their son and their identical twin daughters. They also commit to use only French with each other, thus creating an all-French-speaking home environment. The Caldases also enroll the children in French immersion school and make extensive use of French-language media to further expose the children to French. Finally, the author and his wife purchase a cottage in Quebec where they spend the summers, providing the children with authentic societal language immersion. The outcome of this extraordinary experiment is that, by adolescence, all three children are completely bilingual and biliterate in French and English and can be easily mistaken as native speakers of both Quebecois French and American English.

Type
BOOK NOTES
Information
Language in Society , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , October 2007 , pp. 643 - 644
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

This is the fascinating story of the author's own family project of raising his three children French-English bilingually in English-speaking Louisiana. Caldas, a French-English bilingual himself, and his bilingual French-Canadian wife artificially orchestrate and manipulate the children's environments from birth to adolescence to ensure that the children develop full bilingual proficiency and biliteracy in French and English. Caldas's and his wife's main strategy is to speak only French to their son and their identical twin daughters. They also commit to use only French with each other, thus creating an all-French-speaking home environment. The Caldases also enroll the children in French immersion school and make extensive use of French-language media to further expose the children to French. Finally, the author and his wife purchase a cottage in Quebec where they spend the summers, providing the children with authentic societal language immersion. The outcome of this extraordinary experiment is that, by adolescence, all three children are completely bilingual and biliterate in French and English and can be easily mistaken as native speakers of both Quebecois French and American English.

As Fred Genesee puts it in the book's preface, Raising bilingual-biliterate children in monolingual cultures “is a welcomed addition to case study reports of bilingual first language acquisition” (xiii). Although Caldas's treatment of the simultaneous acquisition of French and English by his children is broad in scope and lacks linguistic detail, the book can be read easily by anyone interested in rearing bilingual and biliterate children, irrespective of his or her background. As a matter of fact, most chapters are anecdotal in form and, at times, as entertaining as fiction. Chapter after chapter, Caldas describes, in a style lacking technicalities, the background of the study, the methodology followed to document the children's degree of bilingualism and biliteracy (audio and video recordings, diary notes, standardized instruments, teacher and child surveys), the characteristics of the home and the community, the children's schooling, and the children's linguistic and social development during the adolescent years. The only section that adds a scientific dimension to the book is chap. 11, which presents the results of the quantitative analyses.

The book's strongest sections are chaps. 8 through 10, in which Caldas discusses how family, school, and society all play a role in the construction of the children's bilingual identities during adolescence. This is a period of bilingual development that has received little attention from other researchers, and thus the author's contribution is particularly valuable to those interested in dual language development beyond childhood. In adolescence, the author shows, the parents' influence on their children's language development decreases drastically while peer influence becomes the major force behind language choice. Therefore, it is only contact with the native francophone peers that furthers and perfects the author's project goal of rearing perfectly fluent bilingual children. A successful example of longitudinal research carried out within the family, Caldas's book should be in the must-read list of all parents who intend to raise their children with two languages.