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In the last half century, concern for the low educational achievement of linguistic minority children has led to a debate for and against bilingual education-that is, an education in which subject-matter, including literacy, is taught in both the child's native language and the majority language, English here. Attempting to enlighten the debate, Cummins (1980) introduced a distinction between basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and cognitive-academic language proficiency (CALP). Cummins believed that teachers and other decision-makers might perceive language minority children who speak English on the playground or with classmates as ready for all-English classes, where he believed they might experience academic failure because they had not yet learned" cognitive-academic" aspects of English. Moreover, Cummins hypothesized that this aspect of language proficiency was specifically a property of the first language:" There exists a reliable dimension of proficiency in a first language which is strongly related to cognitive skills and which can be empirically distinguished from interpersonal communication skills such as oral fluency, accent, and sociolinguistic competence"(1980, p. 177).

While we join Cummins in supporting bilingual education programs, 1 we believe there are undesirable conceptual consequences of the BICS/CALP distinction as it is currently formulated. Specifically, we argue that the distinction confounds language ability and academic achievement, and does not take into account crucial differences between first and second language development; in this connection, we further argue that a consequence of the …