Instructional materials show how language and content are interdependent and reinforce one another by providing opportunities for intentional, explicit, and integrated language and content learning. They offer consistent and spiraled opportunities for ELs to communicate and interact using disciplinary language, as students build content understanding and literacy practices over the course of a unit or year.
Instructional materials include clear and interdependent content and language objectives.
Instructional materials explicitly guide teachers and students to understand the purpose of language within the context of each lesson.
Instructional materials include interactive discussions that engage all students in supporting each other to develop disciplinary language.
Instructional materials include reading and writing activities that develop language and conceptual understanding simultaneously.
Instructional materials include scaffolding through interactive activities that amplify language learning, develop students’ understanding of how language and literacy works, and support students to appropriate language and literacy practices over time. They provide as-needed entry points based on the language demands of complex texts and writing tasks in order to create access and promote engagement.
Instructional materials encourage inclusive and equitable student participation that supports the development of language and content learning based on student needs.
Instructional materials provide students with multiple methods to develop reading, writing, and discourse skills.
Instructional materials provide as-needed scaffolding and entry points to amplify - rather than simplify - complex language.
Instructional materials guide teachers to gradually increase student agency and responsibility for learning over time.
Instructional materials show teachers how to engage students as active and reflective readers and writers through productive struggle, reflection, and student agency. They offer consistent opportunities for ELs to dialogue, revise their thinking, purposefully communicate ideas, and understand where they need additional content or language support.
Instructional materials offer opportunities for students to share their reasoning and regularly discuss relationships and connections between ideas.
Instructional materials offer opportunities for students to regularly discuss relationships and connections between ideas, and to refine and revise their reasoning.
Instructional materials provide strategies to develop students’ metalinguistic and metacognitive awareness.
Instructional materials provide students with opportunities to make choices and foster agency in their learning.
Instructional materials explicitly reject the notion that students learning English cannot grapple with complex texts and intentionally validate students’ home language, culture, and prior knowledge. They show teachers how to incorporate students' knowledge, skills, and experiences—particularly those not traditionally seen as important—to support language and content learning and create a safe, inclusive learning environment where curiosity and openness to differences are celebrated.
Instructional materials guide teachers to recognize, acknowledge, and use the home language of students as effective language support.
Instructional materials include content that is inclusive and culturally relevant, elicits a sense of belonging, and connects content learning to student identities and communities.
Instructional materials guide teachers to connect students’ prior knowledge, literacy and language practices, and experiences to content learning.
Instructional materials include formative and summative assessments that provide students with multiple opportunities to demonstrate language and content learning. Materials indicate to teachers when to collect language samples, how to analyze them for content and language, what specific feedback to give to students, and what progress looks like, including "listen fors" and “look fors.”
Instructional materials include formative assessments that are ongoing to assess students’ progress in both language and content learning.
Instructional materials include summative assessments that offer multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate content and language learning.
Instructional materials include guidance for how to collect and use assessment data to inform teacher decision-making for content learning and language development.
Instructional materials provide ways to communicate student progress to students and their families or caregivers.
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