Do some school-age children have no language? Some problems of construct validity in the pre-LAS Espanol

Bilingual Research Journal, Summer 2002 by MacSwan, Jeff, Rolstad, Kellie, Glass, Gene V

Despite their popularity, the Threshold Hypothesis and the embedded notion of semilingualism (or "limited bilingualism") were advanced in the absence of relevant evidence. In an extensive review of the Scandinavian literature on semilingualism, for instance, Paulston (1983) concluded that "there is no empirical evidence to support the existence of such a language development hiatus as [semilingualism]" (p. 42). MacSwan (2000) reviewed four purported sources of evidence for semilingualism-studies of language shift, school performance, linguistic structure, and language variation-and also concluded that the evidence supporting the semilingualism construct is either spurious or irrelevant to the basic claim. Conversely, considerable evidence has shown that children alleged to be semilingual or "subtractive bilinguals" actually do not differ from native speakers in terms of their linguistic competence (Commins & Miramontes, 1989; Hakuta & D'Andrea, 1992; Valadez, MacSwan, & Martinez, 2001).

Similar criticisms have been made (Edelsky et al., 1983; Genesee, 1984; Spolsky, 1984; Troike, 1984; Martin-Jones & Romaine, 1986; Wiley, 1996; Petrovic & Olmstead, 2001; MacSwan & Rolstad, in press) regarding Cummins' distinction between basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) and cognitive-academic language proficiency (CALP). Cummins (1980) hypothesized that, "there exists a reliable dimension of proficiency in a first language which is strongly related to cognitive skills and which can be empirically distinguished from interpersonal communication skills such as oral fluency, accent, and sociolinguistic competence" (p. 177).

Although there are clearly developmental aspects of a child's second language acquisition that persist well into the school years for many English learners, the theoretical and empirical justification for the BICS/CALP distinction is not persuasive. More specifically, in distinguishing the two kinds of language, Cummins asserts that CALP is characterized by an expanded range of vocabulary and complex grammatical structures (Cummins, 2000a, p. 63; Cummins, 2000b, pp. 35-36), an ability to make complex meanings explicit (Cummins, 2000a, p. 59), and greater demand on memory, analysis, and other cognitive processes (Cummins, 2000b, pp. 35-36). The common belief that academic language has special and enriched properties results from a long tradition of prescriptivist dogma, now propagated primarily in the academy-a tradition that has had the principal effect of justifying social inequalities in terms of "objectively assessed" deficiencies in language, culture, and behavior. However, considerable research has shown that there simply is no human language or language variety that does not have complex grammatical structures. Additionally, there is no language or language variety that does not possess the mechanisms to create new words as new situations arise or to make complex meanings explicit (Crystal, 1986; Milroy & Milroy, 1999).

Nonetheless, the practice of assessing children's oral native language proficiency has become widespread. In 1991, the Council of Chief State School Officers conducted a survey of methods used by local educational agencies to identify language minority children, and they reported that five states require, and four others recommend, that districts assess Spanish-speaking children's oral native language ability upon entry to school. Table 1 lists each state in which the education code requires or recommends native language assessment and also lists the number of children affected. In many other states, the decision to assess children's native language is made at the district level.