Language proficiency and education

There has been a renewed interest in recent years in the relationship between language and thought and in the place of language in education. What I should like to highlight now is something of what has come to be known as the 'Cummins Debate'. Jim Cummins is a psycholinguist involved particularly with bilingualism. His contribution also to the field of special education has been considerable. Concern with the education of minority group children and also with the outcomes of different kinds of teaching programmes, such as the immersion language strategies in Canada, led Cummins to believe that an adequate theory of language proficiency and its relation to school achievement did not exist. Much of the debate amongst Cummins and his colleagues has centred on a certain dichotomy relating to kinds of language, an attempt by Cummins to state what he meant by language proficiency.

He spoke of (a) basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) and (b) cognitive, academic language proficiency (CALP). The first he saw as the everyday surface kind of language, the face-to-face oral communication very much concerned with a shared and obvious context. The second had to do with study skills and literacy, with not so obvious contexts and with more demand cognitively. Cummins believed that all normal children acquire BICS in their mother tongue (L1) fairly quickly as they become socialised within their family and community. CALP comes rather later and has to do with the formal education process. It was an interesting new way of looking at old truths and it opened up many avenues for discussion. It also begged many questions. For example, could the two sorts of language be quite so easily polarised? Were the matters of context and cognitive demand so simply divided? And was BICS strictly to do with oracy and CALP with literacy (shades of other debates in which communicative skills have been linked very closely with oracy)? Could not a face-to-face conversation on nuclear physics, say, be highly demanding cognitively even with shared context and could not a piece of writing to an intimate friend in a context they have not shared be relaxed and entirely non-demanding? The acronyms, some said, were confusing and raised too many questions. Others felt strongly that Cummins had ignored the sociolinguistic component. He has since dropped the acronyms and concerned himself more with the notions of context and cognitive demand, bearing the criticisms in mind. However, the concepts underlying the original thinking seem to me to be important to remember. For convenience I intend to refer to BICS/CALP whilst noting the reservations.

There may well be things here which educationists should be considering, from the policy-makers concerned with learning medium to the teacher in the classroom opting for activities and materials to meet specific needs. It is necessary perhaps that teachers should not so much align themselves with one theory or another but simply be aware of the differing viewpoints and as far as possible cover all the options as a kind of educational insurance policy. So the teacher should be concerned with ordinary everyday conversation and the child's skills in code-switching in different situations. She must also be concerned with the child's growth of concepts and his study skills relating to language. An interesting question which this whole debate in the context of bilingualism has raised is the degree to which proficiency in the first language assists the learning of the second, and if it does, where the threshold would be? What level of proficiency is required and how can it be measured? Is there an underlying capacity which services both the first language and any subsequent language or does each language learnt have its own separate growth-points? There are adherents of both common underlying proficiency (CUP) and the separate development idea. A belief in the first would suggest an educational regime where BICS in the first language (L1) had become CALP before a second language (L2) was attempted. Allegiance to the second would plunge the child into L2 as soon as possible. Again, these are matters for policy-makers. The classroom teacher usually has to accept the policy in which she finds herself. What she can do, to be on the safe side, is to try and find out as much as possible about what the child brings to her class, linguistically speaking, in order to cash in on the assets. It may be that the child has a fair proficiency in both L1 BICS and CALP. What, if anything, can be transferred? Should the teacher, especially of an older child, attempt to move straight into L2 CALP? How does L2 BICS relate to L2 CALP in the formal school situation? Is L2 BICS a necessary step? My own feeling is that the teacher of a second language, even of older learners, should not ignore the stages of development of the first, in so far as she understands them, and that to some extent the L2 learner should be provided for in such a way that he can go through them. This may be particularly important for children having to do other studies in the second language, as distinct from those learning another language as a subject only. On the other hand the latter may also benefit from BICS-like provision in their foreign language as, in achieving communicative fluency in it, they are likely to be meeting with a wide range of social and all kinds of other meanings which may be a vital pre-reading experience. Once more it is better to be safe than sorry. How important it is for policy-makers and teachers both to have a depth of language awareness.