What can we draw from this research on family literacy in Ontario and in French Canada? To put things into perspective, let us first return to the beginnings of family literacy. Family literacy programs were launched because children of low-income families were not doing well at school. To address the problem, the American government sponsored Even Start, a program designed to support local family literacy projects by integrating preschool education, adult literacy (basic skills training, secondary education, as well as ESL programs), education in parenting skills and parent-child family literacy activities for low income families.
Fifteen years ago, the members of the FCAF launched their own family literacy programs in Francophone minority settings. Since its creation in 2004,the Réseau d'experts en alphabetisation familiale has played a front-line role in carrying out research and has provided support to its members, including the Coalition francophone.
Today, members of the Coalition francophone offer family literacy programs in eleven centres in Ontario. Six of these centres took part in the Coalition francophone's research, a five-year research of the impact of family literacy programs on Francophone families. This is the first research in this field to be carried out in Francophone minority settings in Canada. The current report not only describes and analyzes the data gathered in the research, but it also positions the results in the larger context of other national and international researches that evaluate the impact of family literacy programs on the national and internitional levels. What can we say at this stage about the outcomes of family literacy programs? The Alberta Centre for Family Literacy provides an excellent point of departure that we present in greater details:
Family literacy is not just about reading and writing. It's about developing stronger relationships between parents and their children and supporting parents in their own learning process. It is about building stronger families and healthy communities (Centre for Family Literacy, 2008).
Family literacy is not just about reading and writing. Indeed, literacy is much more than knowing how to read and write. It is true that one can think of literacy as primarily academic: this is the reason family literacy programs were started. Raising children's literacy skills was correlated with their academic success. Children who were considered in need of help were from low-income families, belonged to minorities, or did not speak the language of instruction, or not very well. Family literacy programs were designed to prepare parents to help their child acquire literacy skills and, as a result, improve their success at school. However, the research carried out by Heath (1983)proved that certain ways of speaking were not recognized as valid by schools and by the evaluation criteria. Consequently, many forms of discourse and varieties of language that were a mark of identity and of belonging to a community became invisible.