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Social language and academic language serve very different purposes in a learner’s development. Social language is the everyday language students use to interact, build relationships, and navigate informal settings. Academic language is the specialized, discipline‑specific language needed to understand and express complex ideas in school. As Jim Cummins noted conversational fluency is not the same as academic proficiency and students often need targeted support to develop both. Social and academic language are acquired at the same time for school aged children.
Social Language (BICS)
Social language, or Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS), refers to the conversational language students use in daily interactions. It includes familiar vocabulary, simple sentence structures, gestures, and context clues that help learners communicate even when their language skills are still developing. Social language typically develops within one to two years of exposure
Students often appear fluent in social situations long before they are ready to handle academic demands. As Cummins noted students can acquire conversational fluency relatively quickly, but this does not mean they have mastered the academic language required for success in school.
Key features of social language:
• Context-rich and supported by visuals, gestures, and social cues
• Used for greetings, casual conversation, and peer interactions
• Develops relatively quickly (1-2 years)
• Can give the impression of full proficiency even when academic language is still emerging
Academic Language (CALP)
Academic language, or Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP), is the language of schooling—used to analyze, compare, justify, infer, explain, and describe abstract or complex ideas. Academic language is far more demanding and typically takes five to seven years (sometimes longer) to fully develop, even for learners who seem fluent socially.
It includes discipline‑specific vocabulary (like “photosynthesis,” “equivalent fractions,” “text structure”), precise grammatical structures, and the ways of thinking needed for tasks such as writing essays, solving word problems, or interpreting data.
Key features of academic language:
• Abstract, complex, and often decontextualized
• Needed for reading comprehension, writing, discussions, and assessments
• Includes subject‑specific vocabulary and advanced language structures
• Takes significantly longer to develop than social language (5-7 or more years)
Cummins, J. (1979). Cognitive/academic language proficiency, linguistic interdependence, the optimum age question and some other matters. Working Papers on Bilingualism, 19, 121-129
Cummins, J. (2000). Language, power, and pedagogy: Bilingual children in the crossfire. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
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