Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency

Cognitive academic language proficiency, usually abbreviated CALP, is a term developed by the researcher Jim Cummins to describe formal, academic language proficiency, the kind of language needed to succeed with the abstract, context-reduced and cognitively demanding tasks of schooling, such as reading a textbook, following an academic lecture or writing an analytical essay. Cummins introduced the term together with its counterpart, basic interpersonal communicative skills, usually abbreviated BICS, which describes the conversational, context-embedded language proficiency used in everyday face-to-face communication and is typically acquired faster than the academic language competence CALP describes, which research associates with several additional years of sustained exposure and instruction beyond conversational fluency. The distinction is widely used in the education of English-language learners and other second-language students because a student who has become conversationally fluent, and so appears fully proficient to teachers and peers on the basis of everyday interaction, can still lack the academic language proficiency needed to succeed with grade-level academic work, a gap that can go unrecognized and leave such students under-supported or misidentified as having a learning difficulty rather than an ongoing language-development need.