Unraveling the "Language-as-Code" Ideology in Bilingual Education: The Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills/Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency Fallacy

• In Event: 66.034 - Rethinking and Undoing Academic Language

Abstract

The interdisciplinary literature that has served as the foundation for the development of bilingual education programs and that continues to be influential in teacher education has emerged from fields that operate on a definition of language as a rule-bounded system of referential symbols. Yet, the referential qualities of language are but one component of language, particularly when understood from a linguistic anthropological lens. This paper makes two interrelated claims: first, the literature on bilingual education is dominated by a hegemonic conception of language as code, and second, incorporating linguistic anthropological understandings of language to the study of bilingualism and bilingual education is a necessary intervention that will entail a re-thinking of some of the concepts that undergird bilingual education.

Understood from an anthropological lens, language is but one of the many tools that humans use in the communicative act – one employed in semiotic encounters (Agha, 2007). Language form, then, is one of the interrelated aspects of what Michael Silverstein calls the “total linguistic fact”; which also includes language use, ideologies, and social domains (Wortham, 2008). Thus, an anthropological approach to the study of language is the examination of how these four interrelated aspects - form, use, ideology, and domain - come to constitute and be constituted as meaningful social practice. An exclusive focus on one of these aspects will bring about an incomplete picture of languaging in social life – and this narrow ideological notion has come to dominate what is known as disciplinary linguistics and much of the field of second language acquisition. By extension, this theory of language implicitly permeates the field of bilingual education. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to analyze the field of bilingual education writ large, it examines the notion of ‘academic language’, and in particular Cummin’s distinction between BICS, or basic interpersonal communication skills, and CALP, or cognitive-academic language proficiency (Cummins 2003). This distinction, while critiqued by many scholars, has become one of the most widely influential ideas in the field of bilingual education, and quite prominent in textbooks geared towards practitioners (Rolstad & MacSwan, 2008).

Thus, this paper will critically examine the notion of the BICS/CALP as an example of this pervasive “language-as-code” ideology in bilingual education and will re-imagine this concept from a broader understanding of language. This is necessary in order to elucidate the dubious notion of what constitutes CALP or ‘academic language’, and as an attempt to shed light on the deficit perspective that this concept brings to the education of students from minoritized communities and those whose first language is not English.

Agha, A. (2007). Language and Social Relations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press.

Cummins, J. (2003). BICS and CALP: Origins and rationale for the distinction. In C. B.
Paulston & R. Tucker (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: The essential readings (pp. 322–328).
Oxford, England: Blackwell.

Rolstad, K. (2014) Rethinking Language at School. International Multilingual Research
Journal, 8:1, 1-8.

Wortham, S. (2008) Linguistic anthropology of education. Annual Review of Anthropology (37)
3.1-3.15.

Author

• Sofia Chaparro, University of Pennsylvania