A few points stood out to me in the Cummins reading. During one of the group discussions last class, my group discussed how it helps when multilingual learners are partnered or grouped, physically in the classroom, with classmates that share the same native language. One of the reasons why this helps is as besides the teacher, there’s another figure/individual in the class that a multilingual learner can communicate with and lean on. Although there’s been movements to dismantling the power dynamics and hierarchy that exist in the classroom, it inevitably still exists. Especially, for multilingual learners and newcomers who are taking in so much and navigating the social and cultural landscape as well as the linguistic one, it helps to have a peer to rely on rather than a teacher. This is why I found the BICS/CALP distinction intriguing. Oftentimes communication amongst peers or in a social setting is different than the language/communication methods used in a more academic setting. So in my mind it makes sense that there is a distinction between the two, and it also makes sense that multilingual learners develop their conversational fluency faster than their academic language proficiency. I’ve noticed a pattern where language is seen as one lump. And that also applies to language development. The type of language we use, even if it’s within one language, is different based on the people we’re speaking to, the community we’re in, etc.. As a multilingual learner myself, my conversational fluency in Korean grew far quicker than my academic language proficiency because I was using conversational Korean more often throughout the day (with my family and friends) while my academic language proficiency was only tethered to the classroom.
I was happy to see the educational policies and practices implications through the lens of BICS/CALP. For example, there’s policy discussions related to the amount and duration of funding necessary to support multilingual learners. I’m a big proponent of using more research when developing policies that impact multilingual learners. One thing I’ve noticed working in education policy and law advocacy spaces, is that if you haven’t personally experienced what it’s like to be a multilingual learner or if you don’t personally know someone who has experienced this process, it’s easy to be indifferent to how difficult it is to be a multilingual learner. This is especially resonant when multilingual learners are in a community or school where being multilingual is viewed as a deficit rather than an asset. I believe that psych and neuro research can help understand the ways in which multilingual learners learn and process and that such research should be more applied in the policy sphere.