The Threshold Hypothesis, Semilingualism, and Other Contributions to a Deficit View of Linguistic Minorities

Although some educational researchers have appealed to “semilingualism” or “limited bilingualism” to explain differences in student achievement among language minority students, in this article the author argues that the construct contributes much more to the malady than the remedy in the education of linguistic minorities. The author reviews four kinds of reputed evidence for semilingualism (from studies of language variation, linguistic structure, school performances, and language loss) and concludes that all of it is either spurious or irrelevant. The author argues that semilingualism is essentially indistinguishable from classical prescriptivism and that Cummins’s Threshold Hypothesis, which incorporates the semilingualism thesis, should be abandoned on empirical, theoretical, and moral grounds. An alternative account of the descriptive facts Cummins sought to explain is presented, and implications for education are discussed.