Cummins' CALP and BICS

This entry is to discuss a paper by Jim Cummins entitled BICS and CALP: Empirical and Theoretical Status of the Distinction



In:
Street, B. & Hornberger, N. H. (Eds.). (2008). Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 2: Literacy. (pp. 71-83). New York: Springer Science + Business Media LLC.

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The first half of this paper discusses how Cummins derives the term CALP and BICS. As that is not really of my interest, I will discuss the meanings of the terms, and their implication towards language policy planning, and subsequently towards MBMMBI.

 

Definition of the key terms

 

CALP, or Communicative Academic Language Proficiency, can be defined as 'the extent to which an individual has access to and command of the oral and written academic registers of schooling'.

 

BICS, or Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills, refers to the daily communications language skills where one can deliver his/her thought fluently.

 

as the names suggested, CALP differs in the sense of the domain it is used. clearly, an engineer would have different register as compared to an english teacher. as an english teacher, if I were to speak about SLA, BICS, CALP, TPR, CLT ELTM and so forth with my engineer brother, it'd be like a duck talking to a chicken!!

 

but as BICS concerns, we both can speak and deliver our ideas effectively given the wide vocab we both share.

 

Corson (1995) highlighted the enormous lexical differences between typical conversational interactions in English as compared to academic or literacy-related uses of English.

 

Cummins in this paper suggests a list of influences of BICS and CALP towards language policy. among others:

1) The amount and duration of funding necessary to support students who are learning English as an additional language;

2) The kinds of instructional support that EAL students need at different stages of their acquisition of conversational and academic English.


*I dont include the rest as they are related to newly immigrants to the English-speaking countries.

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DISCUSSION POINT

It is important to understand this as I believe that we need to know what is our ultimate goal in teaching English in our schools- is it to make them competent English users, or merely to get them to use the language in academic, i.e. to pass the exam and thus getting good bachelor degrees? And the answer is obvious- we need them to be competent in using English, hoping for better results in the exams hence be more competetive in the market.

How much have we achieve this? How can it be measured?

Nevertheless, I somehow suspect that we Malaysians has not much a problem in term of CALP aspect. Given any test, most Malaysians can do it very well. But there is some problem related to coversational fluency as many of us cant really deliver our needs in English. but somehow i think it is more towards motivation and self-confidence. i will need to read more on motivation, but maybe not so much now as in for the thesis. will read those topics for my recreational readings. :)