BICS/CALP Theory

BICS (basic interpersonal communication skills) and CALP (cognitive-academic language proficiency) are acronyms frequently used in bilingual education to denote types or levels of language proficiency among minority students. Although the BICS/CALP distinction has become widespread among practitioners, it has been controversial among scholars. This entry includes the definition and origins of the BICS/CALP distinction and a summary of the criticisms leveled against this terminology.

Immigrant students often enter U.S. schools without full proficiency in English. At some point in each student's second-language development, a reclassifi-cation decision is made, from the status of a “limited English proficient” student to that of a “fluent English proficient” student. How to determine the point at which such reclassification is appropriate is an important and controversial issue. For bilingual educators, a persisting fear is that some children may give the appearance of full proficiency before they actually do know English well enough to get along in an all-English classroom, prompting teachers, administrators, and test developers to reclassify them too soon.

One approach to this problem was the BICS/CALP distinction, introduced in the 1970s by Canadian researcher James Cummins. Cummins believed that language minority children who speak English on the playground or with classmates might display a kind of surface fluency, which he called basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS), although they have not necessarily achieved cognitive-academic language proficiency (CALP). Cummins identified schooling and literacy as the means by which CALP could be achieved. In monolingual contexts, Cummins explained, the BICS/ CALP distinction reflects the difference between the language virtually all 6-year-old children acquire and the proficiency developed through schooling and literacy. In a later definition of CALP, which he also termed academic language, Cummins described it as the ability to use spoken or written language without relying on nonlinguistic cues, such as gestures, to convey complex meanings.

Cummins reanalyzed cross-sectional language proficiency data reported in prior research by other scholars; the primary interest was to disentangle age of arrival from length of residence of immigrant children, both factors that could independently influence measures [Page 63]of language proficiency. Previous researchers had found that children who had arrived at 6 to 7 years of age eventually caught up to monolingual peers on grade-level norms, but later arrivals did not. Cummins noted that when grouping students by length of residence rather than age of arrival, one sees that older learners acquire academic second language skills more rapidly than younger learners. However, as Cummins noted, the measures used in the previous research tended to target academic rather than pure linguistic factors. In Cummins's analysis of the data, children required 2 to 3 years to approach native-level ability on language tests but as long as 5 years to approach grade level on academic measures. Cummins used the terms BICS and CALP to characterize these different “levels” of language proficiency observed in students.

Later, in response to criticisms that the BICS/CALP distinction created an artificial and arbitrarily delineated dichotomy, Cummins introduced a four-quadrants model of language proficiency, in which language proficiency was conceptualized along two continua, called context embedded and context reduced. Context-embedded communication, Cummins stressed, derives from interpersonal involvement in a shared reality that reduces the need for explicit linguistic elaboration of the message. Context-reduced communication, on the other hand, takes place in the absence of a shared reality, hence requiring linguistic messages to be elaborated explicitly.

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