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Educational and political dimensions of bilingual education 55 Underlying this mandate is an educational rationale based on three key principles, the first of which is the so-called ‘time-on-task’ principle, most explicitly propounded by Porter (1990), which claims a direct, positive correlation between the amount of time spent in learning a second language and proficiency in that language. Neatly dovetailing with popular intuition, the principle would suggest that if children need to learn English to access opportunities, then they should be given as much classroom instruction in, and through, English as possible. Instruction through the pupil’s native language is nothing but an impediment to the acquisition of English, and thereby to LEP pupils’ academic attainment. The second principle, more a notion actually, and implied more than explicit, is that instruction in two languages unduly burdens pupils’ cognitive capacities, especially average pupils, and can adversely affect educational performance. It would be more effective, then, to concentrate effort on developing pupils’ skills in English, the language of opportunity. The third principle is that younger children learn languages readily and rapidly, and, on the whole, are better learners than older children. The policy implication derived is that English teaching – in the form of structured English immersion – should start as early as possible. The point is made with unusual explicitness in Article 1 of Proposition 227: (e) Whereas young immigrant children can easily acquire fluency in a new language, such as English, if they are heavily exposed to that language in the classroom at an early age. (f ) Therefore it is resolved that: all children in California public schools shall be taught English as rapidly and effectively as possible. We now discuss each of these principles in reverse order. 3.2.3.1 Principles 3: ‘The younger, the better’ Extended discussion of the third principle (the optimal age question in Second Language Acquisition (SLA)) lies beyond the scope of this chapter, so we confine ourselves to the straightforward point (Scovel 2000a, 2000b) that older learners may be advantaged in certain areas (e.g. vocabulary learning, pragmatics, literacy) and younger learners in others (e.g. pronunciation, syntax). In addition, age is not a ‘stand-alone’ factor but interacts with a range of other contextual and developmental factors jointly influencing second language acquisition. In a policy-relevant review, Johnstone (2002: 20) concludes on a positive note that: given suitable teaching, motivation, and support, it is possible to make a success of language learning at any age and stage, though older learners are less likely to approximate to the levels of a native speaker. The evidence for what Scovel (2000a: 114) calls ‘the younger, the better myth’ is thus more equivocal than the Proposition 227 drafters suggest.
56 Language Planning and Education 3.2.3.2 Principle 2: bilingualism as cognitive burden Less secure still is the second notion that bilingual instruction is cognitively burdensome for the LEP pupil. Implicit in this view is what Cummins (1980) has called the separate underlying proficiency model of bilingualism (SUP), which claims first that the two languages of the bilingual are stored and function separately, and second that they somehow compete over a finite cognitive space. Neither proposition, however, can be sustained. The available evidence suggests that the two languages interact, allowing the integration and transfer of cognitive material learnt in either language, an idea encapsulated in Cummins’s proposal of a common underlying proficiency model of bilingualism (CUP), to which we return presently. Moreover, ever since Peal and Lambert’s (1962) watershed paper, there has been a steady accumulation of evidence that in certain circumstances the development of bilingual proficiency can procure particular, subtle, cognitive advantages: enhanced metalinguistic awareness, increased capacity for divergent thinking, heightened communicative sensitivity and greater field independence (see reviews of literature by Baker 2001; Cummins 1976, 2000). The evidence is not wholly unequivocal, however, as there have been methodological problems with studies comparing the cognitive functioning of bilinguals against monolinguals, and questions may be asked regarding the persistence of cognitive benefits over time, the precise conditions under which bilingualism is cognitively beneficial, the mechanisms delivering these putative advantages and the direction of causality – from bilingualism to improved cognitive functioning, or the reverse. Additionally, there are studies reporting a neutral or negative relation between cognitive functioning and bilingualism (e.g. Torrance et al. 1970), particularly those conducted with language minority pupils acquiring an L2, which cannot be discounted purely on account of methodological flaws. To reconcile these discrepant findings it has been suggested, following Lambert (1975), that positive cognitive effects are most likely to arise from conditions of ‘additive’ bilingualism, where the individual adds a second language at no cost to the maintenance of an L1, and negative or neutral effects from conditions of ‘subtractive’ bilingualism, where a minority language L1 is gradually replaced by a socially dominant L2. Cummins’s thresholds hypothesis A rather different effort to resolve these inconsistencies, and to explain how a homeschool language switch can be simultaneously associated with lowered academic achievement in language minority pupils in the United States and relatively high academic achievement in majority children in immersion programs in Canada, is represented by Cummins’s thresholds hypothesis. First proposed in the 1970s (Cummins 1976, 1979), and subsequently modified and qualified, this, in its original version, claims that there are two thresholds of bilingual language competence that mediate the effects of bilingual learning experiences on cognitive functioning. The first threshold is reached once the individual has attained a
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viii Series Editors’ Preface Each
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