ELD vs. ELA: What's Grammatical Forms Got to do With It??

The English Language Development (ELD) Standards

In California, these standards were born in the late 1990s, eventually being adopted a little over ten years ago by the State Board of Education. If you want a copy of the framework published by the State of California which includes the ELD standards, you can download it here: http://www.huensd.k12.ca.us/teacherResources/englangdev-stnd.pdf courtesy of the Hueneme Unified School District. For some background on their existence and purpose, it is helpful to read the Introduction. Even seasoned teachers who may have received their credentials before these standards were even conceptualized should understand them.

Why ELD Standards? The Relationship to ELA...

Over 10 years ago, the discussion around English Learners finally came to a head. Now that there were English Language Arts standards were in place, it was clear that many children would not reach these rigorous benchmarks at their grade level. The ELD standards then were considered a pathway that slowly built up and scaffolded an English Learner's acquisition of English in all four domains (listening, speaking, reading, writing). These were a way in essence, to assess a child's eventual acquisition of the ELA standards. This is especially obvious when you see that the ELD standards for ELs in the "Advanced" (Level 5) category are suspiciously similar to the ELD standards.

However, there is one important difference between ELD and ELA standards. ELD standards are grouped into grade level spans: K - 2, 3 - 5, 6 - 8, 9 - 12. Why? Because there was an acknowledgement that ELs come in to U.S. schools at different ages, yet their English proficiency level may not match their incoming grade level's ELA standards. These again, are the scaffolds towards the ELA standards which are based on a grade level expectation.

Enter the Grammatical Form

Of course this did not answer the question for teachers as to how to plan for ELD instruction! Standards are one thing, language objectives are helpful but not the whole picture. Most of this decade California has failed to produce high quality, rigorous ELD standard based curriculum that also provided teachers with the knowledge base for figuring out what grammatical forms would fulfill their language objectives.

Well, its taken private companies (ELAchieve in particular) working together with County Offices of Education, consultants, teachers and many, many other educators to create such a list of expected grammatical forms that an EL can be taught (per the ELD standards), will prepare them for their ELA block and correspond to their current level of English proficiency.

Different districts have taken different approaches to such documents, your district may even use one. Again, picking on the Hueneme unified school district, this is what they've come up with: http://www.huensd.k12.ca.us/edProjects/sysELD.html
Just click on any proficiency level you're interested, for example "Beginning Forms" and voila, you will see a checklist of grammatical forms that ELD teachers observe and monitor for when teaching. This is of course, all in an attempt to provide a systematic way of instructing EL students so they can access the ELA standards.

So we come full circle!

I know it's a lot to absorb for one sitting, but now that we've started looking at ELD instruction in general, and ELD lessons in particular, I felt it was important to mention a little bit of the back story of why there is so much emphasis on language via grammatical forms and patterned language response.

- W

More to come on ELD lessons!