Key Shifts in Common Core
The Common Core State Standards place heightened content and language demands on all students. ELLs must meet these demands while also developing proficiency in English. Ensuring that students are able to accomplish this goal is a huge task for teachers. The Common Core State Standards document doesn't provide a curriculum or prescribe how teachers should teach; it lays out what students need to be able to do at each grade level.
There is a focus throughout the new standards on extensive language use, not just in English Language Arts, but also in math, history/social studies, and science. Thus, many researchers and educators are calling for a paradigm shift. In the past, ELA teachers have traditionally been charged with literacy instruction. However, teachers in all disciplines must be “language teachers” in order to help students meet the standards in each content area. This new reality makes collaboration among teachers a crucial piece in implementing the Common Core. In later chapters of our book, content area teachers share key Common Core shifts in math, Social Studies, and science and how to address these shifts in their subject areas.
Key Shifts in ELA
In English Language Arts, the standards call for three key shifts that support college and career readiness, according to the Common Core State Standards Initiative.69 These “shifts” represent important differences from previous standards and have an impact on instructional, curricular, and assessment practices. We will begin by summarizing the Common Core shifts and then share four key shifts for ELLs.
Shift 1: Regular practice with complex texts and their academic language. The standards emphasize that students must read increasingly complex texts in order to be ready for the demands of college- and career-level reading. As they gain experience with a variety of complex texts they simultaneously build their reading comprehension skills and academic language. Academic language includes both general academic vocabulary that appears in a variety of content areas (such as “effect” or “correlation”) and domain-specific vocabulary that is specific to a discipline (such as “molecule” or “decimal”). This academic vocabulary is not only critical to comprehension, but also allows students to participate in academic conversations (both oral and written) across content areas and to be able to read increasingly complex texts on their own.
In other words, students need to learn how to navigate the types of challenging texts they will see in college and beyond, and they need to acquire the academic language that will enable them to be successful readers, writers, and speakers.
Shift 2: Reading, writing, and speaking grounded in evidence from texts, both literary and informational. The reading standards focus on students being able to read and understand arguments, ideas, and information based on evidence in the text. Rather than answering questions based only on prior knowledge or experience, students must be able to answer text-dependent questions and make inferences supported by in-text evidence. In writing, there is a focus in the standards on evidence-based writing in order to inform or persuade.
In other words, students need to learn how to identify evidence in a variety of texts and be able to use evidence in their own writing and speaking to support their points.
Shift 3: Building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction. The standards emphasize the important role informational text plays in helping students develop content knowledge and vocabulary. The K–5 standards require a 50–50 balance between informational and literary reading. The 6–12 ELA standards place much more of an emphasis than in the past on informational texts, particularly literary nonfiction (nonfiction that contains literary elements like imagery or sensory details). The 6–12 literacy standards in history/social studies, science and technical subjects require students to learn how to build knowledge through reading and writing independently.
In other words, students need to read more informational text than they have in the past in order to build content knowledge and to inform their writing.
Key Shifts for ELLs
In our state, California, the state board of education adopted the ELA/ELD Framework in 2014 designed to facilitate the teaching of ELLs in light of the CCSS and the new California ELD Standards.70 The framework describes four shifts from previous notions of English Language Development and Instruction.71 Though it comes from California, we believe these shifts apply to English Language Learners navigating “college and career ready” standards everywhere.
Language is seen as a resource for making meaning.
In other words, teachers of ELLs shouldn't teach language as a collection of grammar rules, but as a meaningful resource used to achieve various purposes (informing, persuading, expressing feelings, etc.).
When ELLs develop language awareness (conscious understandings about how language works to make meaning in different situations) they are in a better position to comprehend and produce language.
In other words, ELLs at all levels are capable of learning how language works and what kinds of choices they can make with language depending on their purpose, audience, etc.
For ELLs at all levels of English language proficiency, meaningful interaction with others and with complex texts is essential for learning language and learning content.
In other words, ELLs must engage in authentic and engaging conversations around complex ideas and texts. Teachers must provide the scaffolding for ELLs at all levels to build their knowledge of both language and content through these types of interactions.
ELLs learn language and content better through intellectually challenging tasks and texts.
In other words, supporting students in reading challenging texts doesn't mean giving them a watered-down version. ELLs must be given access to challenging concepts and texts, but they need to be supported through appropriate scaffolding.
In later chapters we describe practices we've found successful in addressing the shifts in both Common Core and for English Language Learners.
ELA Anchor Standards
In this section, we will summarize the key elements of the College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for English Language Arts. The anchor standards represent broad standards in ELA for K–12 students. These standards “anchor” the whole document because they represent what students should ultimately be able to do upon graduation in order to successfully transition to college and beyond. The grade-specific ELA standards correspond to the CCR Anchor Standards by number, but also contain added specificity regarding end-of-year expectations. As explained in the standards document, “The CCR and grade-specific standards are necessary complements – the former providing broad standards, the latter providing additional specificity – that together define the skills and understandings that all students must demonstrate.”72
The CCR Anchor Standards are divided into four domains: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening, and Language. Each domain is divided into smaller sections that we have listed below, along with an “everyday” translation in our own words. For each domain we will also present some general, and certainly not all-encompassing, “don'ts and do's” related to teaching these standards with English Language Learners in mind, which we elaborate on in later chapters. We've decided to lead with the “don'ts” and end with the “do's” to reflect our own learning process of making mistakes and learning from them. The actual Anchor Standards for each domain are reprinted in the appropriate chapters appearing later in the book. A more detailed description and analysis of these standards also appears in these chapters.
Anchor Standards for Reading
Key Ideas and Details: Determining what a text says, what it means, and what conclusions can be drawn from it supported by