I have gotten some new followers since my last thread about BICS and CALP so I am going to do one again. Apologies to those who have heard it before but it is so hegemonic in the field that reminding ourselves of its sordid history certainly can't hurt. https://twitter.com/nelsonlflores/status/1206438030032146432

Until the 1960s (white monolingual) researchers believed that bilingualism caused cognitive deficits. This changed in the 1960s most notably with the Peal & Lambert study of relatively privileged French-English bilingual in Canada. Suddenly bilingualism had cognitive advantages.

In the US this shift in research on bilingualism occurred alongside Latinx community struggles to transform the education of their children with bilingual education being proposed as an alternative to the existing monolingual curriculum.

As bilingual education became an option in the US (monolingual white) researchers of bilingualism confronted a problem: many low-income bilingual Latinxs did not demonstrate the same cognitive benefits of bilingualism as middle-class white Canadians and they were like

The hypothesis that (white monolingual) researchers proposed was that these students were semilingual--that is they had not developed native-like proficiency in either English or Spanish and that is why they did not illustrate the same cognitive benefits and they were like

But the problem wasn't solved and critics were like you can't describe people who use two languages everyday as semilingualism. They were like

Proponents of semilingualism were like fine okay we won't use that word anymore. Instead we will say that they have mastered Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) but not Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) and were like

But the problem was not solved. They had simply repackaged semilingualism into a lack of CALP and anybody who relies on this conceptualization to describe their racialized bilingual students have inherited the specter of semilingualism that has haunted our field ever since

In conclusion, a field that once incorrectly claimed bilingualism causes cognitive deficiencies felt confident enough to describe bilingual Latinxs as semilingual and thereby still cognitively deficient and then simply repackaged it as lack of CALP and moved on.

For the record, there is definitely dispute about the existence of the phenomenon the term semilingualism was applied to.

And coercive relations of power have led some bilingual groups language practices to be delegitimized. They are not lacking anything.