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Cited by 265

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 125 of the 125 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

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

Macswan, Jeff·2000·Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences

Abstract

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.

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Crossref · 10.1177/0739986300221001

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Metadata

Authors
Macswan, J.
Venue
Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences
Published
2000-02
Volume
22
Issue
1
Pages
3-45
ISSN
  • 0739-9863 (ISSN-L)
  • 1552-6364
OpenAlex
W2170340338
Cited by
265
References
125
FWCI
11.32
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Threshold Hypothesis, Semilingualism, and Other Contributions to a Deficit View of Linguistic Minorities. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/0739986300221001
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Macswan, J. (2000). The Threshold Hypothesis, Semilingualism, and Other Contributions to a Deficit View of Linguistic Minorities. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1177/0739986300221001

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.