Reading in two languages: Parents’ strategy and language use across book formats during bilingual shared reading

ABSTRACT

This study asked how bilingual parents read to their children in two languages. Data were collected in Montreal, Quebec, where French and English are spoken widely. Parents read children three books in different formats: books in their dominant language, books in their non-dominant language, and bilingual books. Parents’ quality and quantity of reading in any language was stable across formats, but non-dominant language use was highest with books written in that language. Overall, parents relied most on the dominant language during story discussion but provided children with high-quality reading interactions in both languages, regardless of their proficiency in the languages.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Laurie Lambert and Camélia Masella for their help with transcription and coding, and Madison Williams for her help with transcription, coding and proofreading of the manuscript. We would also like to thank Claire Gaudreau and Béatrice Le Tellier for their translation of My Friends and Madina Kawish for her help with participant recruitment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In the pre-registration the word “dominance” was used to refer to continuous dominance, i.e. the difference in parents’ proficiency estimates; however for clarity, here we use the term “balance” to distinguish this type of dominance from categorical dominance, i.e. whether the parent is more proficient in French or English.

2. This is a widely-used criterion for exposure to a language in bilingualism research (see Place & Hoff, 2011 for discussion).

3. 26 dyads completed the study, but 2 were excluded due to poor sound quality in the recorded reading session.

4. We were unable to find commercially-available books with French/English translations that matched the other books in terms of age-appropriateness and style.

5. We planned to include pointing as a dialogic RS in our pre-registration; however, pointing was not always visible, so we omitted this strategy. We also noticed frequent use of a fill-in-the-blank strategy not in the pre-registration, which we then added to our coding scheme.

6. All speech was tokenized with udpipe in R (Wijffels, 2021) and then words spoken by the parent were counted.

7. Note that due to space constraints, these results are summarized in table format in the Appendix (Table A8).

8. These were: 1) dialogic RS produced in any language when reading the bilingual book and the dominant language book (p = .12vs. p = .07), 2) the main effect of book format on the production of dialogic RS in the non-dominant language (p = .13vs. p = .09).

9. It is important that proficiency be distinguished from native speaker status. In fact, Unsworth et al. (2019) found that the former but not the latter was a predictor of children’s outcomes.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants to Krista Byers-Heinlein from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant number 435-2019-1032) and the National Institutes of Health (Grant number 1R01HD095912-01A1), as well as from a fellowship to Erin Quirk from Fonds de Recherche du Québec—Société et Culture and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Fonds de Recherche du Québec—Société et Culture awards to Melanie Brouillard. Krista Byers-Heinlein holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Bilingualism and Open Science and receives research funding through this program.

Notes on contributors

Erin Quirk

Erin Quirk is a Postdoctoral Fellow supported by the Fonds de recherche du Québec in the Department of Psychology at Concordia University. She researches various aspects of the multilingual home environment, including family language policy and children’s language exposure, and their relationship with children’s language development. Her most recent research has focused on cross-linguistic influence in bilingual children’s lexical development, trilingual development in early childhood, and shared reading practices in bilingual families. Her research is also informed by her experiences as a teacher in the multilingual classroom.

Melanie Brouillard

Melanie Brouillard is a Doctoral Candidate in Clinical Psychology at Concordia University, where she holds a prestigious Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her research investigates how to best support bilinguals’ language development across the lifespan. Her most recent work has examined how shared book reading, parental attitudes and beliefs about bilingualism, and ADHD status impact bilingual development.

Krista Byers-Heinlein

Krista Byers-Heinlein is a Full Professor in the Department of Psychology at Concordia University, where she holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Bilingualism and Open Science and directs the Concordia Infant Research Lab. Her research focuses on infants and children who grow up in bilingual environments. She is also active in efforts to improve psychological science, working to improve methods, increase transparency, build large-scale collaborations in the field, and promote equity and inclusion for under-represented groups.