Sociocultural Factors

Linguistic disadvantage is often said to be a major cause
for lack of success in school (Bereiter & Englemann, 1966;
Stahl, 1977). The nature of such a disadvantage is not entirely
clear, although considerable work has been carried out in this
area. Most investigators will agree that both the formal organization
of language (the speaker’s linguistic competence) and
the appropriateness rules related to language use are acquired
mainly through social interaction, and because this interaction
differs from one social group to another, child language will
vary according to group membership (Wells, 1979a, 1979b).
From this common point of departure, studies diverge into two
main schools of thought. One group of scholars (mostly psychologists
and educators) have tended to view the language of
lower-class, culturally disadvantaged children as deficient or
restricted in some way (Bereiter & Engelmann, 1966; Stahl,
1977). The second group (mostly sociolinguists) have viewed
the language of disadvantaged children as systematically different
but highly structured and developed in its own right
(Labov, 1970; Baratz, 1972).
The advocates of the deficit theory claim that the deficient
language ability affects cognitive ability, and they usually base
their claims on Bernstein’s (1960) distinction between elaborated
and restricted code. The elaborated code is relatively
explicit, makes fewer assumptions about the hearer’s knowledge, requires paraphrasing and contextualization, and is
said to be the kind of language that is required in school and in
academic or scholastic enterprises in general. The restricted
code, on the other hand, is less explicit, and therefore makes
greater assumptions about knowledge shared by speaker and
hearer. Such a restricted code has many more in-group markers
and although it is fully adequate for intragroup communication,
it may not be appropriate for intergroup interaction,
thus creating difficulty for the child in the school environment.
The variation in language proficiency and language use
that differentiates between social classes might also be explained
by Cummins’ (1979a, 1979b) distinction between the
academic type of language proficiency originally termed as
Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) and interpersonal
communication skills, Basic Interpersonal Communicative
Skills (BICS). Within the framework of the CALP-BICS
distinction, the interdependence hypothesis was reformulated
by Cummins (1980,1981,1984) mostly for bilingual language
situations in which CALP in the first language and CALP in the
second language were regarded as manifestations of one underlying
dimension. According to Cummins, language
proficiency can be conceptualized along two continua: the first
relating to the contextual support available for expressing and
receiving meaning and the second relating to the cognitive
involvement in the task or activity. Context-reduced and
cognitively demanding situations exert the use of CALP and
are typical of language used for academic, school activities.
Because in the present study we are concerned with the school
context, we felt the need to examine the possibility that culturally
and linguistically different students exhibit different types
of CALP, which in turn might explain their disadvantage with
respect toschool language. If such students are disadvantaged
in language use in their firstlprimary language, might this
affect their chances to be successful in foreign-language learning?
How do affective variables intereact with these CALP
variables for such students?