BICS and CALP: Empirical and Theoretical Status of the Distinction
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BICS AND CALP: EMPIRICAL AND THEORETICAL STATUS OF THE DISTINCTION
INTRODUCTION
The distinction between basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP) was introduced by Cummins (1979, 1981a) in order to draw educators’ attention to the timelines and challenges that second language learners encounter as they attempt to catch up to their peers in academic aspects of the school language. BICS refers to conversational fluency in a language while CALP refers to students’ ability to understand and express, in both oral and written modes, concepts and ideas that are relevant to success in school. The terms conversational fluency and academic language proficiency are used interchangeably with BICS and CALP in the remainder of this chapter. Initially, I describe the origins, rationale, and evolution of the distinction together with its empirical foundations. I then discuss its relationship to similar theoretical constructs that have been proposed in different contexts and for different purposes. Finally, I analyze and respond to critiques of the distinction and discuss the relationship of the distinction to the emerging field of New Literacy studies (e.g. Barton, 1994; Street, 1995). E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
Skutnabb-Kangas and Toukomaa (1976) initially brought attention to the fact that Finnish immigrant children in Sweden often appeared to educators to be fluent in both Finnish and Swedish but still showed levels of verbal academic performance in both languages considerably below grade/age expectations. The BICS/CALP distinction highlighted a similar reality and formalized the difference between conversational fluency and academic language proficiency as conceptually distinct components of the construct of “language proficiency.” Because this was a conceptual distinction rather than an overall theory of “language proficiency” there was never any suggestion that these were the only important or relevant components of that construct. The initial theoretical intent of the BICS/CALP distinction was to qualify Oller’s (1979) claim that all individual differences in language B. Street and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 2: Literacy, 71–83. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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proficiency could be accounted for by just one underlying factor, which he termed global language proficiency. Oller synthesized a considerable amount of data showing strong correlations between performance on cloze tests of reading, standardized reading tests, and measures of oral verbal ability (e.g. vocabulary measures). Cummins (1979), however, argued that it is problematic to incorporate all aspects of language use or performance into just one dimension of general or global language proficiency. For example, if we take two monolingual Englishspeaking siblings, a 12-year old child and a 6-year old, there are enormous differences in these children’s ability to read and write English and in the depth and breadth of their vocabula
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