What is BICS & CALP?
These terms are commonly used in discussion of bilingual education and arise from the early work of Cummins (1984) in which he demonstrated his ideas about the two principal continua of second language development in a simple matrix. BICS describes the development of conversational fluency (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills) in the second language, whereas CALP describes the use of language in decontextualized academic situations (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency ). According to Baker (2006) “BICS is said to occur when there are contextual supports and props for language delivery. Face-to-face `context embedded´ [boldface in original] situations provide, for example, non-verbal support to secure understanding. Actions with eyes and hands, instant feedback, cues and clues support verbal language. CALP, on the other hand, is said to occur in ‘context reduced’ [boldface in original] academic situations. Where higher order thinking skills (e.g. analysis, synthesis, evaluation
