Separating achievement and language as distinct psychological constructs allows us to contrast the learning situation of majority language children (children in the US who already know English) and minority language children in school. While language majority children have the single goal of mastering academic content (math, social studies, science, reading, etc.) in school, language minority children have two goals they must meet in order to be academically successful.

Like majority language children, they must master academic content; but unlike most children, they must also learn the language of instruction at school. Bilingual instruction allows these children and youth to stay on track academically while taking the time to become proficient in English.

Furthermore, in the course of developing children’s knowledge of school subjects, bilingual education provides background knowledge that serves as a context for children to better understand the presentation of new academic topics in the second language and also helps them make inferences. about the meaning of new words and grammatical structures that they find in the new language.

Kellie Rolstad and Jeff MacSwan introduced an alternative to the BICS/CALP (Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills/Cognitive-Academic Language Proficiency) distinction in an effort to avoid some of these pitfalls. They argued that once children have learned English well enough to understand content through instruction in English, they have developed second language instructional competence (SLIC). Unlike CALP, SLIC does not apply to native language development and does not attribute any special status to the language of the school.

Furthermore, while CALP appears to equate cognitive and academic development, SLIC simply denotes the stage of second language development at which the student is able to comprehend instruction and perform grade-level school activities using only the second language, in the educational setting. local. Children who have not yet developed SLIC are not considered cognitively less developed; they just haven’t learned enough of the second language yet to learn it effectively.

Thus, the SLIC concept avoids the implication that a child is deficient and still allows us to emphasize the need for children to continue to receive engaging and cognitively challenging instruction that they can understand for as long as it takes to achieve proficiency in the second language. There is no doubt that James Cummins’ BICS/CALP theory has been a useful tool for professionals in assessing where their students are in their language development. At base, however, the construct remains a theory with little empirical evidence for its existence.

This does not invalidate the contribution; several other important theories have remained unproven while serving as important foundations on which to build further research. However, while critics have applauded the original intent of the BICS/CALP distinction, they have argued that certain refinements are needed to avoid some negative unintended consequences. By distinguishing between academic achievement and linguistic ability and between first and second language development in school-age children, we could better characterize the linguistic situation of linguistic minorities and their performance in school.