This research supports the results that were drawn from the For My Child reports in which the parents reported that

• they had learned strategies that they put into practice in their daily lives;
• they became more aware of the importance of living in French in the home;
• they had greater self-confidence;
• their participation in a family literacy program changed their way of using the French language;
• they were better informed about the resources in French available in their communities and that they had expanded their Francophone network; and
• they noticed changes in the attitudes and behaviour of their child: he was more confident, had enriched his vocabulary, was better at respecting routines and had developed a sense of connection to the French language.

4.3.2 Impacts on parenting skills

Family literacy programs emphasize the "adult" component. They pay particular attention to the parent child learning experiences and interactions that can stimulate the child's development. Ponzetti and Dulin (1997) argue that the researchers in family literacy programs have paid little attention to the rather essential component of parenting skills.

Powell and D'Angelo (2000) and Powell (2004) have created a guide that creates a framework for parenting skills. This guide presents the following strategies:

• Encourage interactions between the parent and child that are linguistically rich.
• Support literacy within the family.
• Provide information so that parents have appropriate expectations about the child's development and learning capacity.
• Encourage the parent to fully assume his role as an educator of his child.
• Help parents to know about and use the community resources that support the family.

The research by Lyonnais (2005) cited earlier also concluded that the workshops were beneficial for parents, resulting in increased confidence in their parenting skills.

The majority of parents who participated in the Coalition francophone's research reported that they greatly appreciated the learning opportunities which helped them become better parents. The parents who participated in the Grandir avec mon enfant program model were particularly well served in this regard, since the program is wholly devoted to improving parenting skills.

4.3.3 Evaluation on the impact of the Learning Together model

Because there are few longitudinal studies of family literacy programs, it is useful to include one that evaluated the Albertan program Learning Together from 2001 to 2006. In their research, Phillips et al. (2006) demonstrated that the combined effect of the parents' education and ability to read has an influence on their child's reading ability before school begins. They emphasize the importance of the physical place where shared parent-child activities take place and suggest that the space needs to be large enough that both parents and children can move around without difficulty and parents can work individually with their child. The authors make comments on the quality and number of the planned activities: