Content + Language, growing our skills
This course is organized as a "Content-based language instruction" program. We often call it "CBI" for short. It means we learn English by talking about other things as well, not just "studying language." We bring the language class and the "subject" class together. But it's more difficult! There are two problems. Simple topics can use simple English, but more complicated ideas require more complicated language. Our brain is "multi-tasking," so we need to balance how hard our brain is working on the subject, and how hard it is working on language. Language experts call simpler language "BICS" - Basic Interpersonal Language Skills. More difficult "thinking while communicating" is called "CALP" - Cognitive/Academic Language Processing. We can see how these compare in this rough chart: Then, the balancing is something like this: The same is true in your first language as it is in a second language. In our ...
