ELD Lessons: The Language Objective- Pt 2

Your target: Mastery of specific language functions

Remember what a language function is? Basically, it is a purpose for using language, such as greeting people, simple describing, comparing and contrasting and describing events that occurred in the not too distant past are all examples of language functions.

So what does the language objective have to do with this? Well, for starters, the daily language objective should be a language function, expressing a grammatical form that students will need to employ (and master) in order to (also) master the language objective, or language function.

The tricky part is that sometimes there are language functions that are quite all encompassing, like when we say "describing events." Well, we could be simply describing events that are currently happening. That would require the use of the present tense grammatical form. A typical language pattern in which this would fit would be My ______ likes to _____. (For example, "My dog likes to roll in the mud." However, you may also need to describe events that happened a few days ago, in which case you would need to employ the past tense: My dog already ______ his _______. My dog already ate his dinner," for example.

As you can see, we have to help our English Learners build not only their repertoire of grammatical forms, but also be able to employ appropriate ones in increasingly more complex aspects of language functions (in this case, it could be the same function!).

Backwards planning

Which is why sometimes its good to start with your nice target for the end of the week, and work your way back. So, for example, if your students did have to employ the simple past tense by week's end, then perhaps we'd work backwards by introducing appropriate vocabulary on the first day (say we're describing our classroom pet's behavior, we'd learn some useful vocabulary that we would be describing eventually). We would practice rabbit, eats, sleeps, frolics, etc. We could then build up to the past tense on a different day by introducing the past tense grammatical form for the verbs we came up with. Then, we could introduce the language pattern that we will be using: Our ____ already ______ his/her/its _______. Our students would eventually fulfill the language objective- as long as they can do this independently.

It is easy to see why it is important to know our students' level of English proficiency, why it is even more important to ensure our students are grouped by English proficiency level during the ELD block: we need to ensure the language functions/ objectives are appropriately challenging. OF course, we also need to accommodate for students' age as well- 5th graders are not fond of describing their classroom pet bunny for 45 minutes!

Finally, it is also important to mention the most important fact of all: you know your students' needs best. If they need more practice with the language pattern, give it to them. If they've already mastered it, ratchet the cognitive challenge by adding an element: perhaps making a compound sentence Our ____ already ______ his/her/its _______ and ________ his/her/its ___________.

Remember, practice makes proficient!

Hope its been useful to focus slowly on the first building block of the ELD lesson.

- W