Many students struggle in school due so much to the difficulty in understanding complex concepts, but instead due to the unfamiliar and specialized language used when presenting the concept. As most parents and educators realize, everyday language skills do not translate into successful academic experiences.
Research from Jim Cummins is among the most comprehensible on this topic. Cummins divided language into to easily digestible categories.
The first is "Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills" (BICS), and the second is "Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency" or CALP.
• BICS (also referred to as "communicative competence") is highly contextualized with lower cognitive demands to understand, and includes the listening and speaking skills that students tend to acquire quickly as they learn a language or as they learn a new language (within the first few years). The young learners master the language in order to communicate with others as they engage daily in ordinary social interactions, such as asking someone for his/her name, asking for directions, requesting food from a menu. BICS are often beneficiaries of non-verbal cues, gestures, facial expressions, and objects that can immediately be referred to (including pointing to them).
• Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP): describes the academic language and the cognitively demanding language skills necessary for success in a formal classroom setting. CALP typically requires 5-7 years to develop, but longer for students with less native language proficiency. CALP is far less contextualized. Lectures, classroom conversations, teacher-student discussions, research projects and complex language skills such as summarizing, analyzing, extracting and interpreting meaning; evaluating evidence; composing; and editing are heavily dependent on a student's mastery of CALP, where one's language proficiency does the heavy lifting (listening or reading) without the assistance of environmental clues or cues.
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