Martha's Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills Paper

Martha’s Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) (Cummins, 2015) are moderately developed. She does not communicate often in the classroom unless it is to turn in work or to ask for clarification. According to Peregoy & Boyle (2013), these basic conversations include relatively short utterances and back and forth interactions. For example, Martha will ask the teacher if something is correct or say “I have my homework”. I have also seen Martha interact with a few students at the library about picking a new book and use phrases like “I picked this one”, “can I have some”, and “do you want to be my partner”. Based on the Common Underlying Proficiency Model (CUP) (Genzuk, n.d.), I believe that Martha’s intermediate level of BICS in English

Martha brought all of her knowledge from Mexico and her schooling in Spanish with her into the classroom. Martha’s educational team, have told me she was a very good student in Mexico and these cognitive abilities such as comparing, hypothesizing, remembering are all available for her to transfer over (Personal Interview with Mrs. Blackwood & Mr. Art, 2017). This knowledge can help her connect ideas in English to ideas and knowledge she already had in Spanish. Martha has been able to transfer and utilize these tools and that is why I believe that she is acquiring higher levels of BICs. Martha’s ELD specialist Mrs. Blackwood, believes that her lack of communication inside the classroom and with peers due to her shyness is what is currently holding back Martha’s English development (Personal interview with Mrs. Blackwood,

While observing Martha’s proficiency in listening, speaking, reading, and writing in academic content areas in English, it became evident that her academic English was not as proficient as her Basic Intercommunication Skills. Martha performs best in the academic field when she can copy a math problem or question off the board and record an answer or sentence on her paper. According to Martha’s ELD specialist, her weakest academic area is reading comprehension (Personal interview with Mrs. Blackwood, 2017). She can often read the words but struggles with the comprehension aspect. During class, they do round robin reading where each student reads one sentence of a story. Martha is able to read most of the words in her sentence out loud, but reads very quiet and only those sitting next to her can hear. However, when asked to read a long passage, Martha struggles to comprehend the longer reading, talk or write about it Personal interview with Mrs. Blackwood, 2017). Martha’s two strongest areas according to her teacher Mr. Art, is her writing and her math. When Martha is jut writing about a topic and the prompt is not based comprehension, she tends to have well thought out writing that is consistent with an intermediate English learner (See Appendix work