A Brief Orientation to The California ELD Standards Companion
Our California ELD Standards Companion takes the substance of the California ELD Standards document and rearranges it into manageable chunks for easy reference. For example, our organization highlights one ELD Standard at a time, building in the performance levels, links to ELA standards, key terms, and classroom snapshots and vignettes. Teachers will not have to flip pages and sections in order to see the related materials for a standard—they are all together and handy to use!
By design, our ELD Standards Companion has a number of features in common with Jim Burke’s format in the Common Core Companion series, which focus on the Common Core English Language Arts standards. These complementary features make it possible for someone familiar with the Common Core Companion series to pick up the ELD Standards Companion and get right to work. These familiar features include
Clearly-organized standards and kid-friendly translation. Each CA ELD Standard appears at the beginning of the section, incorporating the grade levels in the grade span (K–2, 3–5, 6–8, or 9–12) and the three performance levels of each standard (Emerging, Expanding, and Bridging). The same standard is “translated” into “kid-friendly” language (called the Gist) on the next page, so that teachers can see what students need to do in order to show mastery of the standard, again organized by grade level and performance level.
Incorporation of literature and information reading standards listed together, not separated out. This design makes it easier to see how the standard builds across literary genres, performance levels, and grade levels.
Instructional techniques/What the teacher does. In this section, there are specific suggestions for teaching related to the standard itself, providing an answer to the question, “What would this look like in practice?” For each standard, there is instructional differentiation provided by language performance level.
Academic vocabulary: key words and phrases. Each standard is highlighted by a specific glossary of words, terms, and phrases that form part of the understanding of that standard. In many cases, there are examples of the word or term in use.
Equally important are the ways in which this ELD companion also has several unique features. These unique features include
Inclusion of the corresponding ELA Speaking and Listening and ELA Language standards. Each CA ELD Standard is correlated with its Common Core ELA Speaking and Listening and Language standards so that the teacher has a sense of confidence that teaching ELD Standards is also working toward mastery of ELA standards. These correlations were developed by the writers of the California ELD Standards document itself.
Snapshots and vignettes. The final section for each standard summarizes appropriate snapshots and vignettes of classroom practices that demonstrate progress toward the standard. These are classrooms with successful instruction designed for English Language Learners. Teachers are encouraged to read the entire snapshot or vignette on the California Department of Education website if they want more information.
All together, we hope that the familiar features and the new ones of both the CA ELD Standards and the ELA Companion add up to a valuable resource for teachers working with English Language Learners in classroom settings.
Part 1 Interacting in Meaningful Ways A Collaborative Mode
Introduction
Part I of the California ELD Standards promotes English Language Learners’ abilities to interact in meaningful ways so that they acquire English and develop content knowledge simultaneously. Part I comes first in the standards to emphasize that students need to interact with adults and each other about meaning and content in order to build background knowledge and provide context before they enter deeply into how the English language works. Part I, Interacting in Meaningful Ways, is subdivided into three clusters of standards that emphasize student participation in the major modes of communication: Collaborative, Interpretive, and Productive.
Cluster A: Collaborative Mode Standards have the same general descriptions K–12 for the four standards in the cluster, related to engagement in dialogue with others. These include
1 Exchanging information and ideas with others through oral collaborative conversations on a range of social and academic topics. Teachers can structure collaborative learning practices for small-group discussion about the texts students read across subject areas. These practices help students learn the content, vocabulary, and grammatical structures related to the texts in language-rich, iterative social situations. While this standard can be applied to conversations around academic texts, it can also be applied to any type of conversation (social or academic) or to conversations that arise during collaborative group work (Heller & Greenleaf, 2007; Vaughn et al., 2011).
2 Interacting with others in written English in various communicative forms (print, communicative technology, and multimedia). This standard is specific to collaborating through written English (e.g., passing notes, written feedback, collaborative group writing/multimedia projects, collaboration using technology) but also includes word-level processing such as decoding and spelling. It also includes recognizing the organizational features of different academic texts so that students can better comprehend and create their own written texts (Brisk 2012; Gibbons, 2008; Hammond, 2006).
3 Offering and supporting opinions and negotiating with others in communicative exchanges. Not all students come to school knowing how to engage in collaborative discussions with others. Recent research has shown that ELLs can learn how to do this by being “apprenticed” through scaffolded interactions in classroom discussion settings (Gibbons, 2009; Walqui & van Lier, 2010).
4 Adapting language choices to various contexts (based on task, purpose, audience, and text type). Choosing the right language depends on what is happening (the content), who is communicating and their relationship (e.g., peer to peer, student to adult), how the message is conveyed (e.g., written, spoken), and whether the communication is formal or informal (Schleppegrell, 2012). Student success with adapting language choices grows with student ability to increase vocabulary, recognize and use appropriate register, use more complex sentence and clauses, and use connecting/transitioning words to convey meaning (O’Dowd, 2010; Schleppegrell, 2004).
In The California ELD Companion, the What the Student Does section provides specific descriptions of competence with each of the Collaborative standards at the appropriate grade range and proficiency level. Similarly, the What the Teacher Does section provides specific strategies for developing competence with each of the Collaborative standards at the appropriate grade range. And the last section, Vignettes and Snapshots, offers classroom-level descriptions of what each standard looks like in practice.
Source: California English Language Development Standards, K–12 (2012). Chapter 4, “Theoretical Foundations and the Research Bases of the CA ELD Standards,” provides an excellent summary of the research used in developing the four Collaborative standards in Part I, A.
Standard 1: Exchanging Information and Ideas
ELD Standard 1 Organized by Grade Level and Proficiency Level
Emerging
K Contribute to conversations and express ideas by asking and answering yes-no and wh- questions and responding using gestures, words, and simple phrases.
1 Contribute to conversations and express