Three criteria are proposed for evaluating the legitimacy of theoretical claims in multilingual education: (a) empirical credibility--to what extent is the claim consistent with research evidence? (b) logical coherence—to what extent is the claim internally consistent? (c) consequential validity—to what extent does the claim promote effective pedagogy?
During the past 25 years, a variety of new terms have been proposed to capture essential features of what it means to ‘know’ two or more languages. This expansion of the theoretical landscape has generated fruitful intellectual exchange among scholars internationally. However, it has also generated controversy on multiple fronts together with considerable confusion among policymakers and educators about what these new theoretical ideas imply for classroom instruction. In light of this proliferation of terminology in the area of multilingual education, it is clear that we need criteria for evaluating the legitimacy of theoretical constructs. These criteria would provide a coherent and unified discursive framework that can be applied equally to recently emerging constructs such as translanguaging and its accumulated theoretical adhesions (e.g., the claim that languages don’t exist) as well as to related theoretical constructs about the nature of language proficiency and its crosslinguistic dimensions that have been discussed for a considerably longer period of time. The presentation elaborates three criteria for evaluating the legitimacy of theoretical constructs and claims in the area of multilingual education: (a) empirical credibility--to what extent is the claim consistent with all the relevant research evidence? (b) logical coherence—to what extent is the claim internally consistent and non-contradictory? (c) consequential validity—to what extent is the claim useful in promoting effective pedagogy? These criteria operationally define what is meant by ‘legitimate’. In the context of the ‘consequential validity’ criterion, I argue that educators have a major role to play in generating scientific knowledge. Specifically, educators create phenomena that require theoretical explanation through their innovative instructional practice and they also play a significant role in carrying out classroom ‘reality checks’ on theoretical constructs and claims proposed by researchers. This construction of educators as ‘knowledge generators’ has clear implications for teacher education.
