The terms BICS and CALP were coined by
Cummins.
BICS
= BASIC INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION SKILLS
This is oral 2nd language
proficiency. An immigrant child can
acquire oral 2nd 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 2nd 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 2nd language
fluently (to acquire BICS) and the time it takes to acquire the 2nd
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 2nd language fluently have overcome all the difficulties
in acquiring the 2nd 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 2nd language which will end when
the CALP in the 2nd language has developed as well. When the child first learns in his mother
tongue and the transition to the 2nd 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 2nd
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
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.
(source in Hebrew).