The California ELD Standards Companion, Grades 6-8. Jim Burke
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Ever since the 1974 Supreme Court ruled in the Lau v. Nichols case that the English language barrier was an impediment to equal education opportunity for students who do not speak English, schools have been charged with taking affirmative steps to provide access to the curriculum in comprehensible ways while teaching English to levels of proficiency needed for meaningful participation in an academic program. Easier said than done!
The journey of educators began back then, almost a half century ago, to figure out how to teach English effectively and sufficiently for rigorous academic work, and how to scaffold English Language Learners’ comprehension and participation while they are learning English. In a nation in which language is always political, and the education of English Language Learners always at the cross-hairs of larger social battles, the journey has had significant turns and twists. The full meaning of familiarizing teachers with new English Language Development (ELD) Standards in our current era and equipping them to actually use the standards as a tool to guide instruction can only be understood in the context of what has gone before.
Landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s named national origin as one of the classes of people for whom equal protection under the law and whose rights to equal educational opportunity addressed. The Lau decision was the clarifying legal framework setting in motion the scramble by educators to figure out how to do it. And while it did not describe HOW to teach English and provide access, the Castañeda court decision one decade later laid out guidance for educators: Whatever is done must be based upon sound educational theory and/or research, it must be implemented with sufficient resources for that theory to actually work, and you must be able to show results over a period of time. There was no educational theory or research yet at the time. Though there was experience with English as a Second Language since World War I in the context of the military’s work with adults—it had not been developed or tested for use with children or for application to academic settings. The need for sound theory and research was clear.
California actually took the lead by pulling together key theorists who might have parts of the answer for how to teach English Language Learners. Linguists, developmental psychologists, researchers working in other nations with immigrant and bilingual education were approached by the California Department of Education—and a remarkable group answered the call. Names still read in teacher preparation courses (people like Jim Cummins, Eleanor Thonis, Stephen Krashen, Tracy Terrell, and others) worked to put together a Theoretical Framework for Language Minority Students providing educators with key concepts like comprehensible input, the difference between first- and second-language development, language acquisition, the distinction between basic social language (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Speech) and the language of books and academic study (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency), the natural approach, communicative competency, the dual language brain, transfer, for example. And educators worked to pilot and refine the application of those concepts in classrooms with English Language Learners. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s all of this application occurred in the context of bilingual programs where the teaching and development of English was part and parcel of the use of bilingual approaches to enhance comprehensibility and access and to support overall language development through transfer and cross-linguistic relationships. Until increasing immigration and refugee resettlement combined with an economic recession gave opening to an English Only movement and backlash against bilingual approaches. English Language Development—the ENGLISH part of the equation—was expected to stand alone.
By the time No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was instituted with its powerful accountability hammers and a laser-like beam on closing achievement gaps for subgroups—including English Language Learners—English Language Development was fingered in California as the primary approach and support for serving English Language Learners. But ELD was caught in reading wars and prescriptive one-size-fits-all materials where ELD was conflated by many with reading interventions. It was a time of a narrow vision of language, reducing it largely to a focus on reading and reducing reading to a focus on foundational reading skills. As the National Literacy Panel on Language Minority Children and Youth reported, English Language Learners need those foundational reading skills, but they are not sufficient to address the language needs of a second-language learner. ELD instruction became further and further afield from a linguistic research base. Meanwhile, California state monitoring of services for English Language Learners repeatedly found that ELD was a major area of noncompliance. So teachers were feeling increasing pressure to deliver ELD, but not given appropriate or adequate materials, tools, and resources to do so. It was for many teachers of English Language Learners an era of discouragement, frustration, and confusion.
And then, along came the Common Core Language Arts Standards. In comparison to previous English Language Arts Standards, they were stunning in the degree to which they realigned with the research on language development, and the broader vision of language and its role in learning all other content areas was a welcome relief after the narrowness of the No Child Left Behind era. If English-Language Development was going to be about supporting English Language Learners to develop the English needed for academic engagement in the Common Core era, clearly a revamp of the old ELD Standards was needed. By the time the new ELD Standards were released, followed by the historic combined ELA/ELD Framework, the new vision was clear. The shift from previous standards and practices was stunning. Rather than a focus on a narrow set of foundational reading skills and a lockstep progression of English skills, language development was now positioned as integrated in and across all academic content areas. Language is how those academic disciplines are learned, and the academic disciplines are the appropriate context in which to develop academic language. The integration of language and content opened the door for the kind of support and intentional language development English Language Learners need throughout their curriculum. Integrated and Designated ELD were added to the concept and terminology for how we understand ELD. Rather than follow a set scope and sequence along a set continuum toward proficiency, ELD was now to be responsive to student needs, designed in preparation for and response to the language demands of the academic work in which students are engaged. This is a powerful understanding and vision of language development—but it is far more nuanced and more difficult to plan and deliver than the old “follow the pacing plan in the teacher’s guide” approach.
For teachers and administrators who had been schooled in, practiced in, and to some degree traumatized by the NCLB years, these new standards are a major shift and for many, a heavy lift. They not only need to come to grips with new standards, but also need to sort through and unlearn the discipline and beliefs about language and English Language Learners pounded into place during the No Child Left Behind era. Having followed orders and delivered the ELD they were supposed to do, but with inadequate tools and resources to do it, teachers often entered into becoming acquainted with the new ELD Standards not just as a set of standards to teach, but as a confusing subject carrying the baggage of discouraging experiences in trying to make it work in the past.
To pull off this new era of English-Language Development, and to address the needs of our English Language Learners in an era of rigorous academic demands, it is essential that teachers be provided support and guidance in making meaning of the standards, understanding the shifts from previous practice, looking at the linguistic demands of academic tasks and content, and learning how to actually use the standards to plan instruction—in Designated ELD settings and in the context of Integrated ELD throughout the curriculum.
This is an era of extraordinary promise and support for addressing the needs of our English Language Learner students. In July of 2017, the California State Board of Education unanimously passed a new sweeping English Language Learner policy superseding the 1998 policy and leading our state into the 21st century. Hailed as “revolutionary,” the new policy sets a comprehensive and aspirational vision for our state of schools that affirm, welcome, and respond to the needs of English Language Learners, preparing them with the linguistic, academic, and social skills needed for college, career, and civic participation in a global, diverse, and multilingual world. The policy centers on four research-based principles:
1 Assets Oriented and Needs-Responsive schools that value and build upon the cultural and linguistic assets students bring
2 A commitment to Intellectual Quality of Instruction and Meaningful Access through experiences