Teaching Minoritized Students: Are Additive Approaches Legitimate?

Abstract

The emergence in recent years of heteroglossic conceptions of bi/multilingualism and the related construct of translanguaging has raised questions about how these notions relate to more traditional conceptions of additive bilingualism, biliteracy, and the overall academic achievement of minoritized students. In this article, Jim Cummins provides a critical examination of both additive bilingualism and additive approaches to language education to clarify the nature of these constructs and to elucidate their instructional implications. He proposes a synthesis of perspectives that replaces the term additive bilingualism with active bilingualism, that acknowledges the dynamic nature of bilingual and multilingual language practices and the instructional implications of this conceptualization, and that insists that education initiatives designed to promote academic achievement among minoritized students can claim empirical legitimacy only when they explicitly challenge raciolinguistic ideologies and, more generally, coercive relations of power.