What are BICS and CALP, and how are they relevant to 2nd language acquisition?

The terms BICS and CALP were coined by Cummins.

BICS = BASIC INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION SKILLS

This is oral 2^nd language proficiency.  An immigrant child can acquire oral 2^nd language proficiency in one to three years.  BICS is social language, enabling the  child  to communicate basic needs and wants and to engage in basic conversation.  BICS is contextualized language.  The context of play or conversation helps the child understand what's being communicated.  Intonation, facial expressions and gestures, the physical environment in which the conversation takes place etc. supply contextual hints about the content of the conversation. The child can also ask for clarification when he or she doesn't understand.

CALP = COGNITIVE ACADEMIC LANGUAGE PROFICIENCYT

CALP is the  language level required for formal schooling (in elementary school, high school etc.).  A child with developed CALP is able to communicate thoughts and ideas clearly and efficiently and to participate in a high level, abstract conversation.  CALP is the ability to listen, speak, read and write about academic contents at one's class level.  CALP can be de-contextualized.  For example, when the child reads a text, he can't be assisted by intonation, gestures or facial expressions.  He can't ask for clarification.  He has to grapple with language that is much more literary than BICS (a richer vocabulary, more complex grammatical and syntactical structure).  He has to be better acquainted with the cultural context in order to understand many texts.  He has to be able to perform more complex cognitive acts in language, like comparison, analysis and synthesis and drawing conclusions.  CALP is necessary for success in school.

Apparently, it takes five to seven years to acquire CALP.  The time needed depends on a few factors, among them the child's immigration age and the child's CALP level in his mother tongue.  The higher the CALP  in the native language, the less time is needed to acquire CALP in the 2^nd language.  That's because both languages have a common cognitive basis.  A child who has never gone to school in his country of origin or did not develop CALP in his mother tongue (this can be due to his immigrating at a very young age) will need longer time to develop CALP.  In a study in the U.S it was found that children who were 8-12   years old at the time of immigration took 4-5 years to reach the average achievement level of their schoolmates.  Children who were 5-7 years old  at the time of immigration took 6-7 years to reach that level.   Maybe the reason that the younger children needed more time to close the language gap was that they came to the U.S with a less developed CALP in their native language.

Many teachers (and maybe also psychologists) are not aware of this large time lag between the time it takes to be able to speak the 2^nd language fluently (to acquire BICS) and the time it takes to acquire the 2^nd language at a level that enables understanding of the academic contents learned in class (to acquire CALP).

Thus teachers and sometimes also psychologists may wrongly assume that children who speak the 2^nd language fluently have overcome all the difficulties in acquiring the 2^nd language.  Learning difficulties may be attributed then to language learning disabilities.  The child may in fact be still in the process of acquiring CALP.

Experts recommend that learning should take place in the language in which the child's CALP is the most developed, with a gradual transition to the 2^nd language which will end when the CALP in the 2^nd language has developed as well.  When the child first learns in his mother tongue and the transition to the 2^nd language is gradual, the child experiences continuity in the level of the academic contents he grappled with in his country of origin and his new country.  Thus  he can continue working with complex materials that fit  his cognitive abilities, and not experience a drop in the level of complexity of the contents he learns.  This way, the cultural change and the culture shock the child experiences would be less pronounced.  The child will get the message that this mother tongue and his culture are valuable.  I hope to write more about this subject, since this issue is very wide.

Another important thing derived from CALP is that it's very important for parents to nurture   their  child's native language.  The higher the level of the child's mother tongue, the easier it will be for him to acquire CALP in the 2^nd language.  Parents should read to their children in their native language, encourage them to read in their native language and converse with them in their native language.

This information was taken from various sources, among them:

BICS and CALP Jim Cummins

http://iteachilearn.org/cummins/bicscalp.html

The Needs of English Language Learners and the Process of Learning a New Language Prepared by Illinois Resource Center

מדיניות לשונית:  היחס לשפת המוצא של העולים.  מסמך של מרכז המחקר והמידע של הכנסת מ – 2001, הוכן על ידי אביטל אפל. 

http://www.knesset.gov.il/mmm/data/pdf/m00054.pdf

(source in Hebrew).