Casey Fichtner

BICS and CALPS

BICS and CALPS can be seen within my classroom setting on a fairly regular

basis. I will specifically reference one of my English Language Learning students from

this past year as a way to exemplify this point (referred to as Student 1). This student

mastered BICS during her time in my classroom, and began to demonstrate more

frequent and successful use of CALPS as well. I will first discuss how tasks at the

beginning of the year that focused on BICS communication were useful to her language

development. I will then discuss a final task near the end of the year that demonstrated

her beginning development and success with CALPS communication.

Student 1 was a recent immigrant to the United States. At the start of the year,

she engaed with mostly BICS level language demands. I began the year by providing

her with contextualized tasks such as naming objects and matching. For home practice,

I provided her parents with Pete the Cat Go Fish, a phonemic awareness matching

game. They would match a picture to the letter sound card of the first phoneme in each

word. For in school writing assignments, I would have her draw her ideas and then label

images in her story. Eventually, we would work together to develop her labels into

narrative or expository text. For math, she was provided opportunities to use and

discuss her thinking with manipulatives and ‘acting out’ scenarios (BICS). Domain

specific terminology, like ‘addition’ and ‘subtraction’, were included in academic

conversation by peers, initially, and by herself, eventually. Her adoption of this

vocabulary eventually allowed her to respond to oral and written questions that were

decontextualized by not existing in a math story problem (CALPS). This approach to

math allowed Student 1 to practice BICS communication with other students while also
hearing other students engage in CALPS communication. Eventually, this student

moved on from manipulative use and context-embedded story problems to being able to

listen to and apply CALPS language in a variety of math tasks. This approach of using

BICS and CALPS in math also supported other students in their development of domain

specific language and cognitively demanding mathematical concepts.

By the end of the year, Student 1 completed a heavily CALPS related task using

BICS related strategies. She read an article about the Grand Canyon, responding to

each page with an ‘I notice; I wonder’ sentence. In order to achieve this task, she used

a BICS language strategy: checking the picture to clarify understanding. She also

referenced prior knowledge from a class science unit we had just completed that made

many of the concepts in the article concrete (BICS). Reading the article itself, however,

was an incredibly CALPS related task. She did not have non-verbal cues or face-to-face

communication during this process. Literacy demands were central to the task. The

article also expanded past the scientific and cultural aspects that we had previously

learned about.

By the end of the year, Student 1 demonstrated increased CALPS

communication as she no longer asked me to repeat or provide oral instructions for

activities. She would complete grammar morning work on her own, reading the

directions to determine the focus of the activity. In this task, other students in the class

would sometimes struggle with CALPS communication. They relied more on examples

of how the activity was to be completed. They required further explanation of the

directions. These supports revealed a level of comfort in many of my students with BICS

communication over CALPS, which is not all that surprising considering their age and
relative development of language and literacy. This speaks to Cummin’s definition of

BICS and CALPS as a language continuum in which context-embedded language

(BICS) can assist eventually decontextualized communication (CALPS). Student 1, as

well as the rest of my classroom, demonstrated this point throughout the year, by using

both BICS and CALPS communication on a regular basis as a means of developing and

understanding language.