Effects of language dominance on home reading practices of bilingual families

Abstract

Aims and objectives:

Many children grow up in bilingual families; however, little is known about how these families use their two languages in their home reading practices. The goal of this study was to examine the effect of language proficiency on the shared storybook reading practices of bilingual families.

Methodology:

We gathered questionnaire data about home reading activities in French–English bilingual families with 5-year-old children (n = 66) who had different proficiency levels in each language.

Data and analyses:

We compared home reading environment, parent reading practices, and child learning and interest in books across the families’ dominant and non-dominant languages using a series of 2-way mixed analyses of variance.

Findings:

Families gave more emphasis to reading practices in the family’s dominant language: they owned more books, read more often, spent more time, and started reading to the child at an earlier age in the dominant than in the non-dominant language. Dominance also affected parent reading behaviors: parents reported more often translating words and switching from their non-dominant to their dominant language. Parents reported that children enjoyed being read to and readily learned new words in both languages, but ratings were higher for the dominant language. Effects of dominance were strongest in families with less balanced language dominance.

Originality:

This study compares bilingual families’ home reading practices in both of their languages, providing a clearer picture of how families navigate early dual-language literacy in a bilingual community where both languages are spoken in everyday life and have similar sociolinguistic status.

Significance:

Results suggest that even in bilingual communities, family home reading practices may exacerbate uneven development across children’s two languages. These findings highlight the importance of identifying strategies to support enriched home reading practices in bilingual families’ non-dominant language.

Keywords

Bilingual families storybook reading language dominance preschool children home reading practices

Introduction

Early literacy experiences contribute to children’s language and cognitive development (Ard & Beverly, 2004; Raikes et al., 2006; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002; Sénéchal et al., 1998). Families often play an important part in these experiences, by having books at home and reading to children (Fitzgerald et al., 1991). Around the world, an increasing number of children grow up in bilingual households (Byers-Heinlein & Lew-Williams, 2013), and there is a pressing need to understand emergent literacy in bilingual children to improve their educational outcomes (Hammer et al., 2011, 2014). Bilingual families differ from monolingual families in that literacy activities can occur in one or both of the family’s languages. This raises the possibility that families might provide different levels of support for each of the family’s two languages during early literacy activities. The current study investigated how language dominance within bilingual families is linked to the relative home literacy support for each language. We focused on a unique population of French–English families in Montréal, Canada, a highly bilingual community where both languages have similar sociolinguistic status. This allowed us to tease apart the effects of family language dominance from influences of language status on the home literacy practices of bilingual families.

Bilingual families

Throughout this paper, we will use the term “bilingual families” to refer to families in which parents and children use two or more languages at home. Bilingual families take many different forms. In some bilingual families, the parents have emigrated from elsewhere, and so the family speaks a home language that is different from the majority language of the community. An example of this type of family is most Spanish–English bilingual families living in the United States, where English is the majority language and has a higher sociolinguistic status than Spanish (García & Diaz, 1992). The bulk of research on home literacy practices of bilingual families has focused on those living in majority-language contexts (Hammer et al., 2014). Many other bilingual families, however, live in bilingual communities and speak both community languages at home; some examples are bilingual families in India who speak an Indian language and English (Sen & Blatchford, 2001), Chinese–English families in Singapore (Ren & Hu, 2013), and French–English bilingual families living in Montréal. The latter group is the focus of the current research. In Montréal, French and English have similar sociolinguistic status: both can be considered majority languages, as both languages are spoken in everyday life, and attitudes toward both languages are similar and positive (Department of Canadian Heritage, Government of Canada, 2018). Much less research has investigated the home literacy practices of families in which the sociolinguistic status of the languages is largely similar.

Within bilingual families, family members can have different proficiencies in the family’s languages. Most bilingual individuals have a “dominant”, or stronger language, and a “non-dominant”, or weaker language (Genesee et al., 1995). In some bilingual families, family members share the same dominant language, while in others, family members have different dominant languages. For example, in immigrant families, it is common for children to be dominant in the majority community language, and their parents to be dominant in the language they learned growing up (Brown, 2011; Fillmore, 2000; Toppelberg & Collins, 2010). Bilingual individuals also vary substantially in their language proficiencies, particularly in the non-dominant language. Balanced bilinguals have similar proficiency in their dominant and non-dominant language (and may report similar dominance in both languages), while unbalanced bilinguals typically have high proficiency in the dominant language and lower proficiency in the non-dominant language.

As bilingual families become more numerous (Surrain & Luk, 2019), understanding literacy development in their children becomes increasingly important. In some contexts, children growing up in bilingual families are at risk of poorer literacy, language, and educational outcomes than children growing up in monolingual majority-language families (Hoff, 2013). This is a particular concern for bilingual children from lower socioeconomic status families (Toppelberg & Collins, 2010). Shared storybook reading, where an adult reads to a child, has been shown to boost children’s early literacy development (Hindman et al., 2008). Much of the research on shared storybook reading with bilinguals has focused on enhancing children’s language development in the majority language (typically English) (Roberts, 2008; Tsybina & Eriks-Brophy, 2010; Valdez-Menchaca & Whitehurst, 1992; although see also Farver et al., 2013; Xu et al., 2017). Other research has shown that shared storybook reading in a child’s non-English native language does not negatively impact their learning of English in school, likely because learning transfers across languages (Chow et al., 2010; Roberts, 2008). The results from these studies indicate that shared storybook reading is a good strategy to support language development in the majority language, but do not fully address shared storybook reading in the family’s other language.

Many bilingual families have positive views of bilingualism and aim to support language and literacy development in both of the families’ languages, not just the majority language (Genesee, 2004; King & Fogle, 2006). Positive views of bilingualism have been reported by parents of Cantonese–English children in the United States (Leung & Uchikoshi, 2012), Turkish–Dutch children in the Netherlands (Backus et al., 2010; Bezcioglu-Goktolga & Yagmur, 2018), bilingual families in Australia (Piller & Gerber, 2018), and of particular interest to this paper, French–English families in Montréal (Ballinger et al., 2020). More specifically, parents of French–English bilingual children reported that they valued bilingualism both for their children to be able to communicate with family and friends, and for the potential advantages it might offer for education and future employment opportunities (Ballinger et al., 2020). These views are likely to shape family language policy, which refers to the plans families make concerning their language use and choices within their household (King et al., 2008). Accordingly, families who value bilingualism—such as French–English bilingual families in Montréal—likely plan to incorporate both languages into their home reading practices.

Language status might also influence the specific language that families choose for home literacy activities: literacy practices in a majority language might be emphasized because children attend childcare and schooling in this language, and because literacy materials in the minority language are harder to access (Farver et al., 2013). In contrast, in bilingual communities where the two languages have similar status and play more similar sociolinguistic roles, other factors will determine which language families choose for home literacy activities. This is likely the case for French–English bilingual families in Montréal, who report that they were satisfied with the community resources available to support both French and English, such as the availability of books at public libraries (Ballinger et al., 2020).

A third important but unexamined contributor could be the family’s proficiency in each language. In the realm of oral language development, families often speak their dominant language more than their non-dominant language (Gathercole & Thomas, 2009). Here, we explore the possibility that this also applies to home literacy activities. In the next subsections, we review the literature on three important aspects of home reading practices: home reading environment; parent reading behaviors; and children’s contribution to their own literacy development. Although not exhaustive of all aspects of early home literacy, these three areas have been described as key variables that influence children’s literacy development and have been examined in prior research investigating home reading practices in monolingual and bilingual contexts (Bitetti & Hammer, 2016; Kalia, 2007; Sénéchal et al., 1998). This type of research is fundamental to better understand the literacy and language development of children being raised as bilinguals (Hammer et al., 2014), as well as to inform the development of language policies. Our overarching hypothesis is that, when the sociolinguistic status of the two languages is similar, families will emphasize their more proficient (dominant) language over their less proficient (non-dominant) language.

Home reading environment

Home reading environment refers to children’s participation in home literacy activities, as well as the availability of literacy materials in the home. Families vary considerably in how often they read to their children and the duration of their reading sessions. Middle-class North-American families report reading to their children an average of 4–8 times per week (Evans & Shaw, 2008; Sénéchal et al., 1996, 2008), although this varies widely across families, from 0 to 23 times per week (Sénéchal et al., 1996). These same families vary in the amount of time they spend per reading session. One study reported that parents spent an average of 7 minutes reading a book to their child per reading session, with a range between 2 and 20 minutes (Parish-Morris et al., 2013).

For bilingual families, reading sessions can occur in either language, but there is currently little data on the relative frequency and duration of reading in each language. One study of Asian-American families in Hawaii reported that parents read to their children on average twice a month, with a similar frequency in English and in the parents’ native language (Xu et al., 2017). Most parents had low proficiency in English, and thus they might have been expected to read less frequently in English than in their home language. However, as English was the majority language, this may have counteracted potential influences of proficiency. In the Montréal context, where both languages are of similar sociolinguistic status, we predict that bilingual families will read more frequently and spend more time per reading session in the family’s dominant language.

Families also vary in how many storybooks they have at home, which is important because children with access to more books show greater language gains in areas such as vocabulary (Payne et al., 1994). A study of preschoolers growing up in middle-class English-speaking Canadian families found that children had between 41 and 80 books at home (Sénéchal et al., 1996). Only a few studies have examined the home reading environments of bilingual children. For instance, a study including parents of middle-class bilingual (Indian languages and English) preschool children in India (Kalia, 2007) found that children owned between 0 and 40 books (mean (M) = 23 books, standard deviation (SD) = 11.8), although data were not reported separately for books in the families’ dominant and non-dominant languages. Of interest, most studies of bilingual families have been conducted with low-income Spanish-speakers in the United States (e.g. Bitetti & Hammer, 2016; Raikes et al., 2006), making direct monolingual–bilingual comparisons difficult. One study with this population reported that families owned more English-language books than Spanish-language books (Farver et al., 2013). This could be because families were more motivated to purchase books in the majority language, or because English books were less expensive or more available to purchase. However, when the two languages have similar sociolinguistic status and books are readily available in both languages, as is the case in Montréal, families’ proficiency in each language might be reflected in the books they own in each language. We predict that bilingual families in our sample will own more dominant-language storybooks than non-dominant language storybooks.

Finally, parents begin reading to their children at different ages, and children who are read to from an earlier age have better later language, literacy, and communication skills (Brown et al., 2018; Dunst et al., 2012). Parents of monolingual English middle-class children in Florida, USA, reported starting to read to their children around 7 months of age, with a range between 0 and 18 months (Burgess et al., 2002). A similar age—around 10 months—has been reported for children from middle-class families in Canada (Sénéchal et al., 1996), while parents of Asian-American children in Hawaii from low-income homes reported reading to their children from around 16 months of age (Xu et al., 2017). However, studies have yet to compare whether bilingual families start reading to their child in each of their languages at the same or different ages. Based on our overarching hypothesis, we predict that bilingual families will begin reading to their children at a younger age in the dominant than in the non-dominant language.

Parent reading behaviors

A second important aspect of home reading practices is the parents’ reading behaviors. Most research has focused on parent behaviors such as asking questions about the story, highlighting new words, and pointing to the book’s illustrations (Saracho & Spodek, 2010; Sénéchal et al., 1998; Whitehurst et al., 1994). These behaviors are considered high-quality reading strategies, as they have been linked to better language and literacy outcomes in both monolinguals and bilinguals (Collins, 2010; Flack et al., 2018; Han & Neuharth-Pritchett, 2015; Horst et al., 2011; Pappas et al., 2012; Quiroz et al., 2010; Saracho & Spodek, 2010; Tsybina & Eriks-Brophy, 2010). There has been limited research on reading behaviors that would be unique to bilingual parents, who can draw from both of their languages during shared storybook reading.

In the present study, we focused on two bilingual parent reading behaviors: (a) switching to the other language when discussing the story being read (Muysken et al., 1996); and (b) translating words throughout the reading of the story (Tare & Gelman, 2011). Both behaviors are examples of code-switching, which is a natural phenomenon that occurs during oral interactions as well as during storybook reading in bilingual homes (Backus, 1999; Byers-Heinlein, 2013; Kabuto, 2010; Kremin, et al., 2020). For instance, Antillean parents of bilingual children in the Netherlands have been reported to switch between Papiamento and Dutch when reading stories to their children (Muysken et al., 1996). This behavior is a unique characteristic of bilingual parents, but we have little data on how code-switching during shared book reading is related to language dominance. Studies of code-switching in adults have shown that bilinguals more often switch from their non-dominant language to their dominant language than vice versa, and that code-switching is used strategically by proficient bilinguals to facilitate language production (Gollan & Ferreira, 2009). It is important to understand whether and how parents switch their languages during shared storybook reading, as some types of switching (e.g. those that occur within a sentence such as “look at the chien”; Byers-Heinlein et al., 2017) have been linked to slower word recognition in toddlers (Byers-Heinlein et al., 2017; Potter et al., 2019), and smaller vocabulary sizes (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). At the same time, bilingual parents also code-switch to boost their children’s understanding (Kremin et al., 2020), and teach them new words (Byers-Heinlein, 2013). We expected that parents would more often borrow words from and switch to the other language when reading in their non-dominant language, and that this pattern would be particularly strong for parents with unbalanced proficiency across their languages.

Child literacy development

Finally, children contribute to their own literacy development through their interest in reading and books, and their learning during reading. Indeed, a child’s interest in storybooks can influence later reading and writing skills, regardless of the literacy environment and the socioeconomic context in which the child grew up (Carroll et al., 2019). Overall, parents report that most children are very interested in shared storybook reading (Payne et al., 1994; Sénéchal et al., 1998). In bilingual families, research has yet to address whether children show equal interest in reading in each of their languages. One possibility is that children who are interested in books might enjoy them similarly in both of their languages. However, given their greater mastery in their dominant language, we predict that bilingual children will prefer storybook reading in the dominant language over the non-dominant language. We also asked parents about their perceptions of children’s learning of new words during shared storybook reading, to examine whether this too would be linked to language dominance.

Present study

The goal of this study was to examine the effect of language proficiency on the shared storybook reading practices of bilingual families. We used a home reading questionnaire to compare the self-reported reading practices of three groups of English–French bilingual families living in Montréal, Québec, Canada. Montréal offers a unique sociolinguistic context that allowed us to focus on the role of language dominance on the home reading practices of bilingual families controlling for the influence of other variables. Both French and English have official status within Canada and are commonly used in everyday life in Montréal (e.g. 55% of adults identify themselves as French–English bilinguals; Statistics Canada, 2017). However, the official language of the province of Québec is French and there is legislation (e.g. Bill 101) that supports its use in educational and work settings, among other contexts (Kircher, 2014). At the same time, English plays an important role in Montréal society, given its status in the rest of Canada as well as globally (Kircher, 2014). In Montréal, public and private preschool and elementary education are available in both French and English. Television and newspapers are also available in both languages. Moreover, both French and English children’s books are readily available at local libraries and bookstores. Thus, the community provides wide support for families raising children learning French and/or English, and both languages could be considered majority languages.

In the current study, each participating family was composed of one target bilingual parent–child dyad. Families differed according to the proficiency in each language of the parent and child. We hypothesized that family language dominance would be associated with home reading practices, with greater emphasis being put on the dominant language. To review, we predict that proficiency will have a three-fold effect, influencing: (a) the home reading environment, in that families will have more dominant-language reading materials, will spend more time doing literacy activities in the dominant language, and will engage in these activities from a younger age; (b) parent reading practices, in that parents will tend to switch more often from their non-dominant into their dominant language; and (c) child literacy development, in that parents will report more interest and better word learning in the child’s dominant language. Finally, we expect that the effects of language dominance will be most pronounced in the families that had the most unequal proficiency across the two languages.

Methods

This study was approved by the Human Research Ethics Board of Concordia University. Participants provided written consent prior to participation. Data were collected between September 2016 and March 2018.

Participants

Our sample included 66 English–French bilingual families with a 5-year-old child (mean age (M_age) = 5 years, 5 months, SD = 3.66 months, range = 60–72 months), all living in Montréal, Québec, Canada. One parent per family completed the questionnaire. Most participating parents were mothers (86%, n = 57) but some fathers also participated (14%, n = 9). Education was used as a proxy for socioeconomic status: the majority of parents had completed a university degree or higher (73%, n = 48), and the rest had graduated high school (21%, n = 14) or did not report their education levels (6%, n = 4). Demographic characteristics of the sample are presented in Table 1. Participants were recruited through government birth lists, daycares, and community events, and completed the questionnaire as part of an experimental study of word learning in bilingual children (Brouillard, Dubé, & Byers-Heinlein, 2020). The sample size was determined based on the data available from that study.

Table 1.

Participants’ demographic characteristics.

Variable	Group
Variable	Highn = 30	Mixedn = 23	Lown = 13
	Family
English dominant families (% of group)	70	78	100
	Child
	M (SD)	M (SD)	M (SD)
Age (years)	5.4 (0.3)	5.4 (0.3)	5.5 (0.3)
Dominant language proficiency (comprehension)	9.7 (0.6)	9.7 (0.5)	9.6 (0.7)
Non-dominant language proficiency (comprehension)	8.0 (1.4)	3.4 (1.2)	3.6 (0.1)
Age of exposure to non-dominant language (months)	7.5 (14.4)	35.1 (22.7)	44.2 (21.0)
% female	50%	52%	62%
	Parent
	M (SD)	M (SD)	M (SD)
Education (years)	15.9 (2.3)	16.4 (1.9)	16.3 (2.0)
Dominant language proficiency (production)	10.0 (0.2)	10.0 (0)	9.9 (0.3)
Non-dominant language proficiency (production)	8.2 (1.5)	7.7 (1.2)	4.3 (1.1)
% female	83%	96%	85%

Our inclusion criteria were that the parent and child both were bilingual (defined as scoring at least 2/10 in parent-reported language comprehension scores for the child and production scores for the parent, in both French and English), that they have the same dominant language (dominance assessment is discussed further below), that the parents be equally or more proficient in their second language as their child, and that the children have little to no exposure to a third language. Thus, a further 25 participants completed the questionnaire, but were excluded from the final sample, because: (a) the child or the parent turned out to be monolingual (n = 12); (b) the child’s reported proficiency in the second language was higher than that of their parent (n = 2); (c) the dominant language of the child differed from the dominant language of their parent (n = 10); or (d) the child was exposed to a third language more than 10% of the time (n = 1).

Procedure

Parent questionnaires concerning the family’s language background and home reading practices (see Home Reading Practices Assessment in the Online Appendix) were administered in a university laboratory by a native English–French bilingual female researcher. Upon completion of the study, children received a small gift and a diploma for their participation.

Parent and child language proficiency estimates were gathered using an adapted version of the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q; Marian et al., 2007). The questionnaire assessed the parent’s self-reported comprehension and production skills in each of their languages, as well their child’s parent-reported language skills (i.e. oral comprehension and production). This information was used to determine the dominant language of the parent–child dyad (i.e. the dominant language of the family) and to classify families based on their level of language proficiency.

Home reading practices assessment

Parents were asked to fill out the Bilingual Home Reading Questionnaire (adapted from Hood et al., 2008 and Sénéchal et al., 1998) to assess their home storybook reading behaviors with their children. The full questionnaire can be downloaded from https://osf.io/8mdbq. Parents answered questions pertaining to their shared storybook reading behaviors with English books, French books, English–French bilingual books, and books written in any other language spoken in the home. All participants reported owning storybooks in French and in English, while only 49% reported owning an English–French bilingual storybook (i.e. books with translations in both languages on each page), and 19% reported owning a storybook written in a language other than English or French. Although the impact of book format (i.e. monolingual vs. bilingual) on bilingual children’s word-learning abilities has been examined in our laboratory in a related study (Brouillard et al., 2020), here we only report data on single-language English or French books, given that, on average, families did not own many bilingual books (M = 3 books, SD = 3.4), and they did not spend a significant amount of time reading these types of books (M = 0.80 times per week, SD = 1.39). In addition, we focused on home reading behaviors in English and French (and not in any additional languages spoken in the family) since only English–French bilingual families were included, and our interest was in comparing practices in the dominant and non-dominant language, while controlling for the sociolinguistic status of the languages.

The Bilingual Home Reading Questionnaire measures three domains of home storybook reading: (a) Home Reading Environment, which was assessed in five questions: the number of storybooks in the home; the number of reading sessions per week; the time per reading session (in minutes); the number of books read per session; and the age at which the child was first read to; (b) Parent Bilingual Reading Behaviors, which assessed parents’ tendency to discuss a storybook in another language and their tendency to translate words in a storybook into another language. Likert scales were used to assess the Parent Reading Behaviors domain, ranging from 0 (never) to 6 (always); and (c) Child Literacy Development, which assessed parents’ perception of their children’s interest in the storybook and their ability to learn new words during shared storybook reading. Likert scales were used to assess the Child Literacy Development domain, ranging from 0 (not interested at all) to 6 (very interested) for the child’s interest in the storybooks, and from 0 (never) to 6 (often) for the child’s tendency to learn new words from storybook reading. If parents indicated a range (e.g. for the number of books, they answered 15–20 books), the mean of that range was calculated.

Family language dominance

Proficiency of both the parent and the child was determined based on the parent’s rating of relevant measures of their languages on a scale from 0 to 10 in the LEAP-Q. For children, we focused on comprehension scores, given that during shared storybook reading, children are active listeners of the story being read to them. For parents, we focused on production scores (i.e. speaking skills), as reading to children requires language production. We categorized each participant’s proficiency in each language as being high (scoring at least 6/10) or low (scoring between 2 and 5 out of 10). Participants who scored below 2 out of 10 in either language were considered monolingual and were excluded from the study.

For children, proficiency scores and parents’ rankings of their children’s languages by dominance were used to determine children’s dominant language. Most children (89%) had one language that was rated as being of higher proficiency than the other language, and in all cases, parents ranked this as the child’s dominant language. For a few children (11%), their parent reported equal proficiency in the two languages, so the parent’s ranking of the languages was used to determine the child’s dominant language.

For parents, dominance was determined primarily based on their proficiency, with the highest-proficiency language considered their dominant language. In a few cases (15%), parents reported equal proficiency in the two languages, but unlike for children, our adaptation of the LEAP-Q did not include a question that asked parents to rank their languages by dominance. Thus, in these cases their dominant language was assumed to be the same as their child’s dominant language.

All participants had high proficiency in their dominant language. We thus classified families into one of three groups based on the parent and child’s proficiency in the non-dominant language. In the High Group (n = 30), both the parent and the child had high proficiency in the non-dominant language. In the Mixed Group (n = 23), the parent had high proficiency in the non-dominant language, but the child had low proficiency in the non-dominant language. In the Low Group (n = 13), both the parent and the child had low proficiency in the non-dominant language. As described in the exclusion criteria, there were only two families in which the child had high proficiency in the non-dominant language but the parent had low proficiency, so these families were excluded from analyses.

While all children in the study were regularly exposed to either English or French from birth, their regular exposure (i.e. at least 10 hours per week) to the second language (L2) varied between groups (see Table 1). Children in the High Group began regular exposure to their L2 significantly earlier (M_age = 7.53 months, SD = 14.38, p < 0.001) than children in the Mixed Group (M_age = 35.12 months, SD = 22.68) and in the Low Group (M_age = 44.23 months, SD = 20.98). This difference in age of acquisition was expected, as earlier acquisition and longer exposure to L2 is associated with higher proficiency (Johnson & Newport, 1989).

As is typical in Montréal, many parents had some degree of proficiency to speak in a third language (41%): 11% reported limited proficiency (0–1 out of 10; M = 1.0, SD = 0.24), while 20% reported moderate proficiency (2–5 out of 10; M = 3.0, SD = 0.94), and 11% reported high proficiency (6–10 out of 10; M = 6.8, SD = 0.70). From these parents, only 5% reported using the third language with the child, and if it was used, in all cases it was less than 4% of the time (M = 3.7, SD = 2.31). Since the goal of the study was to examine shared storybook reading practices in the main languages of the bilingual families, which were English and French, data concerning reading practices in the parents’ third language were not analyzed.

Results

Data from all measures were double entered into a spreadsheet from the paper questionnaires by the second and third author and a trained research assistant. Cases where there was disagreement were checked by referring to the original questionnaire to verify the information reported by the parent. The full dataset and analysis scripts are available at https://osf.io/8mdbq.

Our main analysis was a series of two-way mixed analyses of variance (ANOVAs) with group (High, Mixed, and Low) as a between-subjects factor and language dominance (dominant vs. non-dominant) as a within-subjects factor, which were conducted separately for each question of the Bilingual Home Reading Questionnaire. Significant interactions were followed by t-tests. No corrections were made for multiple comparisons. Cases where there was missing information in one of the variables (e.g. data only available for number of reading sessions in the dominant language), were not included in the ANOVAs, given the within-subjects design of the study. Results are discussed separately for each of the three domains of interest. Means and standard deviations for each variable are presented in Table 2 and results from statistical analyses are presented in Table 3. A table reporting median scores is also provided as Online Supplemental Material, as some parents provided extreme but possible answers on some questions (e.g. they reported owning 300 books). However, removal of these outliers did not change the pattern of results, so they were retained for analysis.

Table 2.

Means and standard deviations for variables in the bilingual home reading questionnaire.

Question	Group
Question	High		Mixed		Low
Home Reading Environment	Dom.M (SD)	Nondom.M (SD)	Dom.M (SD)	Nondom.M (SD)	Dom.M (SD)	Nondom.M (SD)
Number books at home	56.4 (32.1)	32.4 (24.2)	96.7 (80.5)	22.8 (29.1)	78.1 (44.0)	13.8 (6.5)
Reading sessions/week	6.1 (3.3)	3.7 (2.6)	6.6 (2.8)	2.1 (1.7)	6.5 (1.9)	2.8 (2.4)
Time/session (minutes)	15.0 (6.8)	11.6 (5.2)	16.3 (5.9)	10.5 (5.6)	21.0 (3.8)	14.3 (8.1)
Books/session	1.7 (0.8)	1.3 (0.5)	1.8 (0.9)	1.3 (1.0)	2.2 (0.9)	1.5 (0.7)
Age at which the child was first read to (months)	6.7 (8.8)	10.0 (12.7)	5.0 (5.6)	22.2 (19.6)	3.9 (2.7)	28.8 (19.6)
Parent Bilingual Reading Behaviors	Dom.M (SD)	Nondom.M (SD)	Dom.M (SD)	Nondom.M (SD)	Dom.M (SD)	Nondom.M (SD)
Parent tendency to switch languages to discuss the story°	1.3 (1.5)	3.1 (1.9)	1.1 (1.5)	4.7 (1.4)	0.6 (1.1)	3.9 (1.6)
Parent tendency to translate words during reading°	0.7 (1.2)	2.5 (1.8)	1.8 (1.9)	4.7 (0.9)	0.8 (1.3)	3.9 (1.6)
Child Literacy Development	Dom.M (SD)	Nondom.M (SD)	Dom.M (SD)	Nondom.M (SD)	Dom.M (SD)	Nondom.M (SD)
Child interest in books°°	5.8 (0.6)	5.6 (0.7)	5.9 (0.3)	4.5 (1.1)	5.9 (0.3)	3.9 (1.6)
Child tendency to learn new words°°°	4.3 (1.2)	4.1 (1.2)	4.9 (1.2)	4.8 (1.1)	5.5 (0.9)	4.5 (1.8)

Note. °Likert Scale (0 = Never; 6 = Always).°°Likert Scale (0 = Not interested at all; 6 = Very interested).°°°Likert Scale (0 = Never; 6 = Often).

Table 3.

Results of the 2 (Language: Dominant, Non-Dominant) × 3 (Group: High, Mixed, Low) Mixed ANOVA.

Question	ANOVA
Question	Language	Group	Language * Group
Home Reading Environment
Number books at home	F(1,63) = 48.77,p < .001, η²_{_G} = .27	F(2,63) = 1.74,p = .183, η²_{_G} = .03	F(2,63) = 5.12,p = .009, η²_{_G} = .07
Reading sessions/week	F(1,57) = 60.73,p < .001, η²_{_G} = .31	F(2,57) = 16.00,p = .855, η²_{_G} < .01	F(2,57) = 3.21,p = .048, η²_{_G} = .05
Time/session (minutes)	F(1,57) = 38.16,p < .001, η²_{_G} = .15	F(2,57) = 2.80,p = .069, η²_{_G} = .07	F(2,57) = 0.91,p = .4096, η²_{_G} < .01
Books/session	F(1,56) = 12.17,p < .001, η²_{_G} = .09	F(2,56) = 1.10,p = .34, η²_{_G} = .02	F(2,56) = 0.10,p = .905, η²_{_G} < .01
Age at which the child was first read to (months)	F(1,62) = 51.49,p < .001, η²_{_G} = .24	F(2,62) = 3.26,p = .045, η²_{_G} = .06	F(2,62) = 9.77,p < .001, η²_{_G} = .11
Parent Bilingual Reading Behaviors
Parent tendency to switch languages to discuss the story	F(1,57) = 113.47,p < .001, η²_{_G} = .47	F(2,57) = 2.47,p = .094, η²_{_G} = .05	F(2,57) = 5.13,p = .009, η²_{_G} = .07
Parent tendency to translate words during reading	F(1,59) = 117.29,p < .001, η²_{_G} = .43	F(2,59) = 10.74,p < .001, η²_{_G} = .19	F(2,59) = 2.63,p = .080, η²_{_G} = .03
Child Literacy Development
Child interest in books	F(1,62) = 85.29,p < .001, η²_{_G} = .37	F(2,62) = 10.55,p < .001, η²_{_G} = .16	F(2,62) = 14.02,p < .001, η²_{_G} = .16
Child tendency to learn new words	F(1,60) = 5.46,p = .023, η²_{_G} = .03	F(2,60) = 3.99,p = .024, η²_{_G} = .09	F(2,60) = 2.31,p = .108, η²_{_G} = .02

Note. Statistically significant effects (p < .05) appear with a shaded background.

Home reading environment

We first examined descriptive statistics collapsing across the three groups. Parents reported that children owned between two and 300 books (M = 74.7, SD = 57.8) in their dominant language and between one and 150 books (M = 25.4, SD = 24.7) in their non-dominant language. This is similar to what has been reported for monolingual English-speaking Canadian families (41–80; Sénéchal et al., 1996). On average, parents reported 6.3 (SD = 2.9) reading sessions per week in the dominant language and reading 1.9 (SD = 0.8) books per session,¹ with an average session duration of 16.6 minutes (SD = 6.3). In the non-dominant language, parents reported an average of 2.9 (SD = 2.4) reading sessions per week, reading 1.4 (SD = 0.8) books per session, with an average session duration of 11.7 minutes (SD = 6.0). Compared to previous reports of monolingual English-speaking Canadian families, who averaged reading 4–8 times per week (Sénéchal et al., 1996), reading frequencies for bilingual families appeared similar in the dominant language but somewhat lower in the non-dominant language. Finally, parents reported that they started reading to their children at early ages, especially in the dominant language (M = 5.6 months, SD = 6.9; non-dominant language M = 18.1 months, SD = 18.2). Comparable data from monolingual English-Canadian families reported that parents started reading around 10 months (Sénéchal et al., 1996), which is somewhat later than what bilingual families reported for their dominant language, but earlier than what they reported for their non-dominant language.

Results from the 2 (language: dominant, non-dominant) × 3 (group: High, Mixed, Low) ANOVAs confirmed a significant main effect of family language dominance on the five questions assessing the home reading environment. Families owned more books and reported more reading sessions per week, and longer reading sessions in the dominant language as compared to the non-dominant language. Furthermore, parents read more books per session to their children in the dominant language, and they also reported reading to children from an earlier age in the dominant language. The age at which parents began reading to their child in the non-dominant language was strongly correlated with the age at which the child began acquiring that language (r(57) = 0.51, p < 0.001), although some families (n = 26; 44% of families who responded on these items) reported reading to their child in their non-dominant language prior to their child receiving regular exposure to this language. Most of these families (n = 22; 37% of who responded on these items) reported a greater than 6-month difference between starting to read in the non-dominant language and their child’s regular exposure to that language. Together, these results supported the prediction that families provided more support for home literacy activities in the dominant than non-dominant language.

Language dominance interacted with group for some questions, indicating that the effects of dominance were different depending on the group. More specifically, for the number of books at home, the number of books in the dominant language was significantly larger in the Mixed Group relative to the High Group, and the High Group owned significantly more books in the non-dominant language than the Low Group. In other words, the most balanced bilingual families (i.e. the High Group) owned a more similar number of books in the two languages, as compared to the other families (the Mixed Group and the Low Group). For the number of reading sessions per week, the High Group had more reading sessions per week in the non-dominant language relative to the Mixed Group. Finally, for the age at which the child was first read to, although all groups tended to read at a younger age in the dominant language (main effect of dominance), the High Group read to their children in their non-dominant language significantly earlier relative to the other two groups, which is likely related to children’s earlier age of acquisition of the non-dominant language in this group. Overall, these two results suggest that the effects of language dominance are attenuated for families with more balanced proficiency across their languages.

We did not find significant main effects of group for the majority (4/5) of the questions assessing home reading environment variables. Thus, when both languages were taken together, families of different proficiencies in their non-dominant language did not differ on these items, indicating that the overall time and resources devoted to home reading activities across groups tended to be similar (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Scores from the home literacy environment variables by group and language dominance. Error bars represent standard error. Results from the age child was first read to variable are in months. Results from the time per reading session variable are presented in minutes. Two extreme scores (>300) for books owned were removed for plotting of individual scores for visualization purposes but were retained in the computation of the means and standard deviations, as well as other analyses.

Parent bilingual reading behaviors

Averaged across all three groups, parents reported more frequently switching languages and discussing the story in the dominant language when reading in their non-dominant language. This was confirmed in the results from the 2 (language: dominant, non-dominant) × 3 (group: High, Mixed, Low) ANOVAs, which showed a significant main effect of language dominance on both the question assessing translating and the question assessing switching.

There was also a significant effect of group for parents’ tendency to translate words, and language dominance interacted with group for parents’ tendency to switch languages to discuss the story. Specifically, for both variables, parents in the Mixed Group were more likely to switch to their dominant language to discuss the story and to translate words when reading in their non-dominant language, relative to parents in the High Group. Similarly, parents in the Low Group tended to translate words when reading in the non-dominant language more often relative to the High Group. These findings suggest that parents with less balanced proficiency translate and switch between two languages more often when reading to their children (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Scores from the parent bilingual reading behaviors variables by group and language dominance. Error bars represent standard error. Scores are based on a Likert scale (0 = never; 3 = sometimes; 6 = always).

Child literacy development

Across groups, bilingual children had a high reported interest in reading in both of their languages (dominant language M = 5.8, SD = 0.5; non-dominant language M = 4.8, SD = 1.3; maximum score 6). Similarly, parents observed that their children readily learned new words from books in both their dominant (M = 4.7, SD = 1.2) and non-dominant language (M = 4.4, SD = 1.3; maximum score 6). However, as in the other domains, ANOVAs revealed significant main effects of language dominance on both these variables. Parents reported that children were more interested in and showed a higher tendency to learn words from storybooks written in their dominant language than in their non-dominant language.

Significant main effects of group proficiency were also found for both variables, and language interacted with group for the child’s interest in storybooks. Relative to the other groups, parents from the High Group reported that their children had a greater interest in and were better able to learn words from non-dominant language books. This suggests that higher proficiency in both languages attenuates the effect of language dominance on children’s interest in books and tendency to learn words (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Scores from the child literacy development variables by group and language dominance. Errors bars represent standard error. Child interest in books scores are from a Likert scale (0 = not at all interested; 3 = somewhat interested; 6 = very interested). Scores from parents’ perception of child to learn words from books are based on a Likert scale (0 = never; 3 = sometimes; 6 = often).

Discussion

The goal of the current study was to understand the home reading practices of bilingual families, specifically whether family language dominance is linked to how the two languages are used. We investigated this question by comparing home reading practices across the two languages within families, as well as across families having different proficiency in each language. We expected that: (a) families would give more emphasis to their dominant language than their non-dominant language; and (b) that this effect would be stronger for families with uneven language profiles than those with more balanced proficiency across the two languages.

Our results confirmed our predictions. Across different proficiency groups, bilingual families had different home reading practices in their dominant than in their non-dominant language. We will discuss the domains of home language environment, parent bilingual reading behaviors, and child literacy development in turn.

Families consistently provided greater home literacy support for the dominant than the non-dominant language: they reported having more books; reading more frequently; spending more time reading per session; reading more books per session; and starting to read at an earlier age in the dominant than in the non-dominant language. This pattern was found both in families with more balanced and less balanced proficiency in the two languages, although it was particularly strong for families with less balanced proficiency. These findings suggest that home reading practices are influenced by the family’s language dominance. Parents might contribute to this pattern, for example, by choosing to buy more books and spend more time using the language in which they are most comfortable. Children might also contribute, for example, by more often asking their parents to purchase or read books in their dominant language, or wanting to continue reading longer in their dominant versus in their non-dominant language.

Moreover, parents’ and children’s influences on home reading practices might be reciprocal. For instance, parents may use the language that their children understand best to support their language comprehension (Goodz, 1994), while children’s language abilities influence the language choices of their parents (David & Wei, 2008). Given that in this study parents and children shared the same dominant language, parents might have engaged in more reading activities in the dominant language since they and their children were both more comfortable and proficient in this language. This is supported by our finding that the age when parents first began reading in their child’s non-dominant language was tightly coupled to the reported age of acquisition of that language. Further, children might feel more comfortable when shared storybook reading sessions take place in their dominant language, which in turn could influence the home reading environment.

Although these factors were not measured directly in our study, families’ language policies might have impacted their home literacy practices. Parents of bilingual French–English children in Montréal have positive views about bilingualism and value both languages, given their importance in Québec society (Ballinger et al., 2020). Consequently, these families likely have language policies intended to support their children’s bilingualism. Some families might have planned to emphasize their dominant language in the home, expecting their child to be exposed to their non-dominant language outside the home. For these families, it is unsurprising that they provided more home literacy support in the dominant language. Other families might have planned to support both languages at home to a similar degree. However, our results suggested that most families nonetheless provided more support to the dominant language. It is possible that for these families, language policies may not be implemented in the context of storybook reading, perhaps because parents are less aware of their language choices during this activity.

Finally, local community factors could also have influenced bilingual families’ home reading practices in our study. Although both French and English are widely spoken in Montréal, neighborhoods differ in terms of the relative use of each language, and in turn whether they traditionally attract English-dominant versus French-dominant families. These demographic characteristics might influence the availability of resources, such as books and other reading materials in each language.

Language dominance was also linked to the microstructure of parents’ reported reading behaviors. Parents appeared to use their dominant language to support their non-dominant language during shared storybook reading, by switching and translating into the dominant language. This pattern was present for all families but was particularly pronounced for families with unequal proficiency across their two languages. Our results are consistent with previous studies of parents of bilingual toddlers, who also reported switching into their dominant language when teaching new words to their child (Byers-Heinlein, 2013).

On the one hand, switching may signal that parents are using their linguistic resources to the best of their ability when communicating with their children, falling back on the dominant language when they or the child have insufficient proficiency or comfort in the non-dominant language. This could potentially serve to boost children’s comprehension and learning, enabling transfer from the stronger language to the weaker language. Indeed, in spontaneous oral interactions, French–English bilingual parents use code-switching strategically to boost their children’s understanding and to teach new words (Kremin et al., 2020), which is convergent with other findings that parents of bilingual children switch languages depending on the context’s needs (e.g. to direct children’s attention; Goodz, 1994). Importantly, experimental work suggests that bilingual toddlers do not experience a processing delay when switches occur from the non-dominant to the dominant language (Potter et al., 2019), which was the prevalent direction of switching reported in our study. On the other hand, switching could limit children’s opportunities to learn new words in their non-dominant language, particularly less-frequent words that parents might hesitate to produce in their non-dominant language.

Finally, language dominance was related to two measures of children’s literacy development. Parents reported that children showed greater interest in and a better ability to learn words in their dominant language. Oral language abilities influence literacy development for bilingual children (Bialystok, 2002), and it is possible that stronger oral skills in the dominant language impact children’s ability to learn new words in this language, as well as their interest in stories. However, recent experimental work that has directly tested word learning during shared storybook reading found that children were equally successful at learning dominant and non-dominant language words, suggesting that parents’ perception may not be accurate (Brouillard et al., 2020). Little research has directly compared bilingual children’s interest in being read to in each of their languages, but perceived or real differences could contribute to why families spend more time reading in the dominant than in the non-dominant language.

Further qualitative and quantitative studies are needed to better understand the findings of this study. For instance, future studies should directly ask parents about their family language policy, their attitudes to biliteracy, their access to materials in the two languages, as well as other underlying factors that motivate their reading practices during shared storybook reading. This type of information would provide more insight into parents’ approaches, goals, and constraints concerning shared book reading, and could be used by educators and researchers to support bilingual families. It would also be important for future research to directly observe the reading behaviors of bilingual parents, to determine exactly when and why language switching occurs during shared storybook reading, and how this behavior impacts learning.

The current study makes several important theoretical and methodological contributions. First, this is one of the only studies to report and compare bilingual family’s home reading practices in both of their languages, providing a clearer picture of how these families navigate early dual-language literacy. Second, we studied a unique population of bilinguals living in a community context where both languages share a similar sociolinguistic status and are used in everyday life, which allowed us to control for differences found in other contexts where both languages are not equally supported in the society. This differs from most previous studies of bilingual families’ literacy practices, which have tended to focus on families from an immigrant background, where the home language does not share the same status relative to the majority language (typically English; e.g. Xu et al., 2017). Finally, our study was able to compare families in the same community who spoke the same language pair, but who had different relative proficiencies in the two languages. Thus, we were able to examine the effects of proficiency using both cross-family comparisons (families with more vs. less balanced proficiency) and within-family comparisons (by comparing each family’s dominant and non-dominant language). This provided converging evidence showing the important role of language dominance and proficiency in shaping bilingual families’ home reading practices.

Results from this study have practical implications for supporting bilingual children’s early literacy development in the home. Our findings show that despite living in a highly bilingual context where both languages have a similar sociolinguistic status, one language (i.e. the family’s dominant one) tends to be favored during shared storybook reading. Given that activities such as shared storybook reading have been shown to promote future language and literacy development in children (Ard & Beverly, 2004; Raikes et al., 2006; Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002), our findings highlight that families might need to make a conscious effort to support the development of their non-dominant language, even when that language has high status in the community. Parents need to be aware of the tendency of bilingual families to support the dominant language, as they may wish to consciously allocate more time for reading to children in their non-dominant language and provide access to more books in the family’s non-dominant language. These practices might benefit the child’s acquisition of their non-dominant language. Even if families participate in activities where both languages are used (e.g. oral exchanges), shared storybook reading provides unique opportunities for children and parents to learn vocabulary about concepts that are not immediately present in the current environment, and to discuss ideas concerning a variety of topics (McKeown & Beck, 2003).

This study has some limitations that should be addressed in future work. First, our study used parent-report data, and future studies should confirm and expand on our results using direct home observations. Second, our study focused on a population of French–English bilingual families in Montréal. This was a strength, as in this context both languages share a similar sociolinguistic status. However, the generalizability of these results should be determined by studying other populations of bilinguals, for example, in communities in which there is a single majority language. Finally, our data were collected from a questionnaire completed by one parent. It is unclear whether answers reflected only the behavior of that parent or took into account the practices of other adults in the family. Future work should more carefully assess the contributions of different family members.

Taken together, our results demonstrate that bilingual families allocate more time and resources to home literacy activities in the family’s dominant language. Children are perceived to enjoy reading more in the dominant language, which could reciprocally affect parents’ and children’s choices of which language to read in. Our findings are important, as many bilingual families wish to transmit literacy skills to their children in both languages but may not be aware that they are supporting one language more than the other. Given the evidence that reading to children in their non-dominant language promotes general literacy skills in both languages (Chow et al., 2010), it is important to identify strategies to support enriched home reading practices in bilingual families’ non-dominant language.

Supplemental Material

IJB938153_Supplemental_Material_CLN – Supplemental material for Effects of language dominance on home reading practices of bilingual families

Supplemental material, IJB938153_Supplemental_Material_CLN for Effects of language dominance on home reading practices of bilingual families by Ana Maria Gonzalez-Barrero, Nicholas Salama-Siroishka, Daphnée Dubé, Melanie Brouillard and Krista Byers-Heinlein in International Journal of Bilingualism

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was funded by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [402470-2011] to Byers-Heinlein, by a Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture Postdoctoral Fellowship to Gonzalez-Barrero [2018-B3-205717], by Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada Undergraduate Research Summer Awards to Dubé and Brouillard, and by a Concordia Undergraduate Summer Research Award to Dubé. Krista Byers-Heinlein holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Bilingualism.

ORCID iD

Ana Maria Gonzalez-Barrero

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author biographies

Ana Maria Gonzalez-Barrero is a postdoctoral fellow in Psychology at Concordia University and a Speech-Language Pathologist. She holds a Ph.D. from McGill University. Her research interests focus on language and literacy acquisition in bilinguals and multilinguals and on the effects of bilingualism on language and cognition in typically-developing children as well as in children with neurodevelopmental disorders.

Nicholas Salama-Siroishka is a graduate student in Social Work at l’Université du Québec à Montréal. He holds a Bachelor of Arts – Specialization in Psychology from Concordia University. He is also an Educator for Batshaw Youth and Family Services and has a degree in Youth Work.

Daphnée Dubé is a graduate student in Speech-Language Pathology at the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders at McGill University, in Montreal. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and Psychology from Concordia University. Her research explores vocabulary learning and assessment in monolingual and bilingual children and adolescents.

Melanie Brouillard is a graduate student in Clinical Psychology at Concordia University, in Montreal. Her research explores how early bilingual home environments foster language outcomes. Her recent work focuses on how shared book reading and parental attitudes and beliefs about bilingualism influence bilingual development.

Krista Byers-Heinlein is an associate professor in the Psychology department at Concordia University, in Montreal, and the director of the Concordia Infant Research Laboratory. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia. Her research investigates language acquisition and cognitive development, with a focus on bilingualism in infants and preschoolers. She has published papers on topics such as language perception and discrimination in bilingual infants, word learning by young bilinguals and trilinguals, and how parental input influences bilingual development. E-mail address: k.byers@concordia.ca.

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