RAISING BILINGUAL-BILITERATE CHILDREN IN MONOLINGUAL CULTURES

Extract

RAISING BILINGUAL-BILITERATE CHILDREN IN MONOLINGUAL CULTURES.Stephen J. Caldas. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. xvi + 231. $39.95 paper.

Caldas's work tells the story of his three children's language development over the course of 19 years. Caldas is a native English speaker from Louisiana and a fluent but nonnative speaker of French. Caldas's wife hails from Quebec and is a native French speaker, also fluent in English. Their three children—a boy and twin girls who were born 2 years later—were raised in suburban Louisiana with extended French-immersion vacations in Quebec. Caldas and his wife attempt to make their home a French-only environment by adopting a family language policy of speaking only French themselves and by promoting French-language books, television, and media. Whereas they are successful throughout the children's early years, their project meets resistance when their eldest boy reaches about 10 and begins to reject everything French. The younger girls soon follow in his footsteps. With patience, perseverance, and regular extended visits to French-speaking Quebec, this phase passes, and by the volume's happy ending, all three children become bilingual and biliterate teens (and presumably adults).