week 4 reading response

Review the key points in Chapter 8 "Key Points in this Chapter" pg. 180

Choose one key theory and summaries: "The Thresholds Theory" or "The Balance Theory"

    Chapter 8: The Cognitive Theories of Bilingualism and the Curriculum gave me a rough but vivid expression about how people treated bilinguals in history. No wonder I saw so many references mentioned about the bilinguals' disadvantage. In this assignment, I chose the thresholds theory because not only it's trendy but also gave me more imagination to think about our brains. 

    In the threshold theory, our brains or you can say the operation center has three stories. The upper floor represents better or higher capability of language application. Not like monolinguals go straight to the top level, bilinguals have two operators racing to the goal. These two operators are frienemy, sometimes they cooperate sometimes they are against each other. But basically, they need to correspond and complement each other, if both of them stay on the first floor, that would be the worst situation which means the owner of this center would far behind s/he age-appropriate content. Even if any of them reach the top roof without the other one, they still can't make most of the operation center unless both of them surpass the obstacle reaching the peek. To some extent, if researchers were right, it will take more than 5 years to complete this mission. 

    Based on the theory, it generated further question: where are the thresholds? Namely, what is the benchmark to define balanced bilinguals? So the BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills) and CALP (Cognitive/ Academic Language Proficiency)  were naturally delivered. Though CALP left some controversial point to be clarified and had some limitations in it, e.g. this theory gave special status to educated, middle-class language style(p.172) or didn't count culture, social, political, community, teacher expectations, and home factors(p.178) in, the fundamental idea provided a mapping scaffold for teachers to have a deeper understanding of students' false performance. Applying the two dimensions diagram also enables educators to think about the curriculum design and assessment with ideas of cognitively un/demanding communication and context embedded/reduced communication.

Reference

1.Baker, Colin: Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilinguals (5th edition). Multilingual Matters. Tonawanda, N.Y. 2011. (ISBN: 9781847693556)