Students who are not fluent in English as their main language face a multitude

of challenges in their education, but one particular challenge was identified

by Dr. Jim Cummins in the late 1970s. Dr. Cummins discovered that many English
language learners (ELL) were being mainstreamed into classes and greatly
struggling despite their apparent fluency in English.

The problem was that these students were developing conversational fluency,
what Cummins referred to as basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS),
well before they were capable of handling the more rigorous academic language.
Cummins called the ability of these students to understand the difficult
language used in schools, cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP).

His research found that ELL students are able to be conversationally fluent in
approximately two years, but it took them 5-7 years to be considered fluent in
academic language. Just think of the difference between chatting casually with
your friends about someone’s issue and trying to comprehend our lesson today.

Since Cummins' discovery, the idea of integrating ELLs has changed

dramatically, with the main methodology which is the cognitive academic
language learning approach (CALLA).

CALLA is a method of combining cognitive theory with lesson planning and

learning strategies to develop content to build the academic fluency of ELL
students and is now implemented to help those students who have gained social
fluency with English but are struggling with their academic fluency or those
who may have academic fluency but are struggling in applying their skills.