In: Psychology
Explain why the distinction between BICS and CALP is important. Which takes longer to develop?
Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) refer to linguistic skills required in everyday, social face-to-face interactions. On the other hand, Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) focuses on proficiency in academic language or language used in the classroom in the various content areas. a distinction between BICS and CALP is important to educators and instructors. The distinction indicates the degree to which discrepancies with respect to social language use and language use in an academic context.
Many teachers and administrators tend to assume that a child is proficient in a language when they demonstrate good social English. However, this may not be necessarily so. In fact, academic language require higher order skills such as comparing, classifying, synthesizing, evaluating, and inferring. These skills may take several years to acquire and therefore academic language is much more complex.