The acquisition of academic language in a second language is a most laborious and time-consuming process. It usually takes five to seven years to obtain cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP), versus the time from six months to two years to develop basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS). As Echevarria and Graves point out, this distinction between the two kinds of language skills has been popularized by Jim Cummins.
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He also explained his graph "Range of Contextual Support and Degrees of Cognitive Involvement in Communicative Activities" by saying: "communicative tasks, such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing, may be easier or more difficult for second language learners, depending on the task itself and the amount of contextual support available."
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He charted the process as four quadrants formed by the horizontal continuum - contextual support, ranging from contextually embedded communication to context-reduced communication - and by the vertical continuum - cognitive demands of the task, ranging from a cognitively undemanding task (easy) to a cognitively demanding one (difficult). For example, having a casual conversation with a friend is a relatively easy task for an English Language Learner since he or she relies on contextual clues and the conversation doesn't involve academic language. However, the most common types of classroom activities are context-reduced and cognitively demanding tasks. They include the most difficult tasks, for example, reading a text without visual clues, listening to lectures, taking tests, understanding math concepts, and writing compositions. When I begin working with bilingual students as they enter mainstream classrooms, their conversational or playground language is proficient, and their academic or classroom language is very often below basic. Needless to say, academic language is the main area on which I concentrate my teaching and where students need the most support. In this unit, visual materials and the procedure of talking about them provide context-embedded clues, which turn a difficult academic task into a manageable one.
If students are asked to write about the immigration experience of a character after reading a certain book, they need to collect the necessary evidence from the text to support the point they are making. This is a challenging skill that needs to be taught throughout students' time in elementary, middle, and even high school; in other words, finding appropriate evidence in a text is a cognitively demanding task for students, and for English Language Learners in particular. At the same time, when these students are provided with sufficient context-embedded clues, such as those in a photograph or a drawing, and asked to write about the experience of a character in a photograph, they may start their writing with the description of a physical setting and the character's appearance. Plain description should then lead students to interpretations and conclusions about the visual object. This initial stage in the process of creating a writing piece involves working with words and has to be guided through a group discussion. (A more detailed plan of working on a writing piece is offered in the Strategies section below.) Teaching writing to bilingual students with visual materials that create a comprehensible input
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or a context is a more doable task than teaching writing with a minimum of contextual support, such as that typical of verbal explanation.