CLIL, BICS, and CALP — Bridging Everyday Language and Academic Thinking
Over the years, I’ve seen how easily students can appear “fluent” in a second language — chatting confidently with peers — yet still struggle deeply when faced with academic texts or abstract classroom discussions.
That difference lies at the heart of CLIL and the balance between BICS and CALP.
BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills) refers to the language of everyday interaction — social conversations, greetings, or classroom routines. These skills develop relatively quickly, often within 1–2 years.
CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency), on the other hand, is the language of schooling — reasoning, hypothesizing, comparing, evaluating, summarizing. Developing CALP can take five to seven years, even for motivated learners.
In a CLIL classroom, these two dimensions intersect constantly.
Students are not only learning content through another language; they’re also learning to think, reason, and communicate in that language at a deeper, more academic level.
That’s where our role as teachers becomes so powerful and so complex.
CLIL isn’t just about simplifying content or pre-teaching vocabulary; it’s about scaffolding language and cognition together.
For example:
Turning a group discussion into a chance to move from BICS (“I think it’s good”) to CALP (“I would argue that this approach is effective because…”).
Using visuals, organizers, and sentence frames to help students express complex ideas without oversimplifying the content.
Encouraging reflection by moving from “knowing the words” to “using the language to think.”
At its best, CLIL helps students build both linguistic confidence and academic depth. It values the expressive power of everyday language while guiding learners toward the precision and abstraction required for deeper understanding.
When students can navigate between the social and academic registers of language, when they can both chat and challenge, we start to see true bilingual learning in action.
Let’s discuss:
How do you help your students bridge BICS and CALP in your CLIL lessons?
What scaffolds, tasks, or routines help them move from surface communication to deeper academic language use?
Share your examples, challenges, or favorite classroom moments
