· How have schools in my area responded to minority cultures and languages? How could this be improved?

I live in a part of Spain where we speak Spanish and Catalan. My parents moved to Catalonia several years ago. They are from the south of Spain, so once in Catalonia, they had to learn Catalan, which was not easy for them as they only had BICS input.
I did not have any problem with Catalan when I started attending school and neither did my siblings. Although they did not need Catalan in their daily life, my parents needed to understand the written information I used to bring from school, which were written in Catalan.
I remember myself when I was about 15 years old in the street helping a Romanian father who could not understand the information sheet that his daughter brought from school, which obviously was written in Catalan.
As you can see, schools did not help much minority cultures.

Nowadays the actual situation is pretty different. No child is left behind.
Those children moving to an unknown country suffer the consequences of being surrounded by a completely new culture and language. They do not have any social income where they can build social models of reference. At the same time, they fight against the exigencies of the Educational System who are pretty much the same ones for the rest of the native pupils.
Schools complain year after year about how difficult is to make those students achieve the minimum contents in order to get proper results.

In the Catalan schools, as we understand that the fact of having two languages to learn is an added difficulty, we reinforce the specialized learning according to each pupil’s needs.
Those students who can’t understand Catalan or Spanish are invited to attend specialized teaching. They are placed in a separated classroom where they are taught those languages from a very level of difficulty. They start from the beginning learning the basic vocabulary. To do so, the teacher uses a cultural topic which helps the students learn about our culture. Those classes are based on gaming, they learn through games.
The new pupil don’t spend the whole day isolated in that classroom, they are taken back to their regular class for subjects like Arts, Physical Education, New English, New Technologies or Music.

I consider that is a good way to bring those students the opportunity of learning about the place they are living now. Without this specialized attention, they would feel lost and it would take longer for them to reach a proper development of their language skills according to their age.

BICS and CALP

· Describe your own learning experience using what you know now about BICS and CALP.

When I first started learning English at seven years old I enjoyed being able to express myself in three different languages (Spanish, Catalan and English). Although I was already using English, it has not been CALP until I started doing it at my home University where I have had specific lessons to develop a more sophisticated level of knowledge.

About one year ago I decided to move to London in order to apply and develop my conversational skills in a social setting, and this would be BICS.

I am now able to enjoy a new experience in a totally English environment where I can deal with daily exchanges with increasing confidence in BICS and CALP.