Guidelines for extensive reading of texts on the use of ESP in European transnational education
Bilingual and English as a Second Language (ESL) educators commonly refer to two types of English language proficiency: Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP). As you have already learned these terms were coined by Jim Cummins (1980) who found that while most students learned sufficient English to engage in social communication in about two years, they typically needed five to seven years to acquire the type of language skills needed for successful participation in content classrooms. Limited English proficient (LEP) students’ language skills are often informally assessed upon the ability of the student to comprehend and respond to conversational language. However, students who are proficient in social situations may not be prepared for the academic, context-reduced situations, and literacy demands of mainstream classrooms. Judging students’ language proficiency based on oral and/or social language assessments becomes problematic when the students perform well in social conversations but do poorly on academic tasks. The students may be incorrectly tagged as having learning deficits or may even be referred for testing as learning disabled. To avoid the possibility of incorrect evaluation of students Cummins (1984) offered a theoretical framework which embeds the CALP language proficiency concept within a larger theory of Common Underlying Proficiency(CUP).