Initial meetings were then held with the school resource teacher and area day care centre director to explain my research study. Informed consent was obtained from them before their involvement was secured. [Refer to Appendix B.] Both of these women were well known in the community. They were familiar to the families and through their work had developed trusting relationships with them. For these reasons, they were asked to identify potential participants who were representative of their community in terms of socioeconomic status, language of the home and educational level (G. Anderson, 1990) and who also met the other criteria for the study in terms of having a child enrolled in the Core French¹⁴ program in the primary grades. They also provided me with background information on community resources for literacy development and their perceptions regarding parental involvement in the child's schooling. [See Appendix C for the interview schedule used.]

The purposive sample consisted of a total of eight students in the grade 1, 2 and 3 Core French program (age six to eight years) who were matched for gender and grade level with two levels of parental educational attainment. That is, half of the selected students had a parent with a high school diploma, the equivalent credential, or were actively working on academic upgrading in a program. To contrast, the others did not have a parent who had graduated from high school or a parent who was upgrading his or her skills for the General Educational Development (GED), a diploma awarded to adults who have not completed high school but are successful in writing an equivalency exam. Often these adults enrol in courses for educational upgrading before writing the exam. Family composition details for each case are contained in Table 2 on the next page.

As shown, four of the eight families had both a female and male adult present. The primary contact for all of the families was the mother. Of these families, John, Lynne's partner (Case 2) and Andrea (Case 7) hold a high school diploma or equivalent, while Jane (Case 8) has a modified diploma, but was not included in the more educated category since her education level was estimated to be below grade 6. Julie (Case 1) and Michelle (Case 5) were involved in academic upgrading, while the others had all dropped out of school and had no other formal education. In terms of gender and grade level distribution of the children, there were four boys: two in grade 1 (Case 3 and Case 6) and one each in grade 2 (Case 1) and grade 3 (Case 5). The girls were also evenly distributed with one in grade 1 (Case 4); two in grade 2 (Case 7 and Case 8) and one in grade 3 (Case 2).

¹⁴ Core French and French Immersion are the two programs offered in New Brunswick public schools. In the Core French program, French is taught as a subject for one period each day or several periods each week for a minimum total of 1300 hours of instruction in French language, grades 1 to 12 (Department of Education, 2003a).