Advice literature is ubiquitous. Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) argue that our modern lives motivate if not require us to consult the experts. In many fields, experts have negotiated a discourse accessible to the public in handbooks, guidebooks, self-help manuals, etc. As I discover in this study, these public discourses can reinscribe both expertise and social inequity. This project analyzes guidebooks directed to parents seeking to raise their children to be bilingual along with their uptake (Freadman, 2002) by parents and children. It studies these rhetorical practices, revealing a sometimes contested dialogue among experts, consumers, and the social context that shapes the discursive construction of its participants. I explore three interdependent corpora: (1) a corpus of guidebooks written for parents and educators during the past 20 years (available in the U.S. and referenced frequently in bilingual family networks); (2) a corpus of research findings on bilingual language acquisition during the same time frame; and (3) a corpus of Parents' and Children's narratives and practices as critical consumers of both research and guidebooks and active agents in enacting their linguistic identities. I use critical discourse analysis (e. g. Van Dijk, 1993 and Wodak & Meyer, 2001) as the main theoretical framework for my reading of these discursive practices. It is important to acknowledge here that these practices of seeking advice, the way the advice is represented, and identities that are constructed through the representation are highly diverse, fluid and, indeed, contested. The discursive representations of what it means to be bilingual and bicultural are negotiated critically by both the experts and the consumers. Chapter One discusses some discrepancies between research findings and advice literature and argues that a monolingual language ideology is the basis for these discrepancies; Chapter Two provides a genre-based analysis to further account for the discrepancies; Chapter Three discusses families' uptake of discourse on raising bilingual children. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]