Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / November 2003

And here's what one of them answered:

Offhand I don't know of any work that has specifically targeted this aspect
of adult ESOL.  I'm sure I've heard people use Jim Cummins' BICS (basic
interpersonal communicative skills) and CALP (cognitive/academic language
proficiency) distinction to support the notion that it generally takes
around 2 years to become conversationally fluent and 5-7 years to catch up
to academic peer norms, but I can't remember whether it was from an
authoritative source.  Virginia Collier has also done interesting work in
this area.   She basically states that the second language learner is trying
to catch a moving target when seeking to approach peer norms.

There are a couple of things that make it a bit hard to know how to answer
your contact in a meaningful way including the goal: "academic English in
the workplace."  Many people would understand academic and
vocational/business English to be very different (e.g. book reviews and
research papers vs. business letters and reports).  I wonder if your contact
isn't referring to the latter.  If so, depending on the type of target
interaction, I'd guess that it would likely not take as long to acquire a
reasonable level of competency (whatever "reasonable" is in this case).

Your contact might find it helpful to check out an online draft document I
came across some weeks ago.  It's called "Framework for Adult ESOL in the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts" and is available at
http://www.doe.mass.edu/acls/frameworks/esol.pdf       The project team
member consultants include Donald Freeman, Kathleen Graves, and Diane
Larsen-Freeman.