Four differences between BICS and CALP (and why) (2024)

FAQs

What are the differences between BICS and CALP? ›

What Exactly Do BICS And CALP Mean? Both terms refer to different aspects of language learning. BICS skills are necessary for everyday conversation, like small talk and speaking on the phone. CALP skills are needed for academic success, like writing essays and participating in class discussions.

Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP), as proposed by Jim Cummins in 1979, are categories of linguistic proficiency. BICS is the language that learners use in their everyday, real-world interactions, while CALP is essentially the discourse of the classroom.

Students that develop more in BICS, which is more conversational fluency, may not be strong in CALP because it is more academic in nature and requires more cognitive skills. For a child to master CALP, they have to be able to learn how to listen, speak, read and write their second language.

Examples of CALP might be: writing an essay, understanding a scientific paper or reading content area textbooks.

CALP refers to formal academic learning. This includes listening, speaking, reading, and writing about subject area content material. This level of language learning is essential for students to succeed in school. Students need time and support to become proficient in academic areas.

The acronyms BICS and CALP refer to the length of time required by immigrant children to develop conversational skills in the target language and grade appropriate academic proficiency in that language.

Some examples of BICS questions are “Do you like pizza?”, “Did you go to the birthday party?”, “Do you want to play?” Reading and writing skills are also basic. Books include short and easy to understand sentences. Examples of text that would fall under BICS is “I like apples”, “I like bananas”, “I like carrots”, etc.

CALP refers to the language one needs for academic and higher-order cognitive purposes. CALP is the kind of language one may use in discussing topics where high-level, subject-specific vocabulary is required, such as a discussion about the theory of evolution.

CALP involves language that is more cognitively demanding and is required for children to access the curriculum fully. The skills required at this level of language proficiency will involve comparing, classifying, evaluating and inferring.

What is the focus of BICS in language acquisition? ›

Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS) refers to a student's ability to understand basic conversational English, sometimes called social language. At this level of proficiency, students are able to understand face-to-face social interactions and can converse in everyday social contexts.

An awareness of the difference between BICS and CALP can help education professionals understand why an ELL may speak well in social situations and yet lag behind peers academically. An ELL often just needs time and support to acquire the complex language needed for schoolwork.

Academic English (CALP) takes much longer to develop. Most theorists agree that it takes at least 5 – 7 years (some think as many as 10 years) to develop this language understanding sufficiently to participate in all English academic classes with little or no support.

CALP is frequently discussed when assessing English Learners (EL). For those learning a second language, BICS develops first and in a relatively short time while CALP takes much longer.

The CALP levels are available in English and Spanish. They describe language proficiency in English and Spanish for Oral Language, Broad Oral Language, Listening Comprehension, and Oral Expression clusters as well as for the three Spanish-language clusters: Lenguaje oral, Amplio language oral, and Comprension auditva.

Examples of BICS vocabulary words include book, pencil, marker, cup, plate, apple, banana, shirt, pants, hat, coat, car, plane, eye, nose, or mouth. These words are called tier one words. Tier one words fall under the category of BICS and are common words used in everyday speech.

If teachers practice strategies that help students develop both BICS and CALP, students will gain the language skills required to excel in academic settings while also improving their social language skills. By incorporating some simple yet effective strategies, teachers can give students the balance they need.

The Whole-word Approach teaches kids to read by sight and relies upon memorization via repeat exposure to the written form of a word paired with an image and an audio. The goal of the Language Experience Method is to teach children to read words that are meaningful to them.