ELA Guidelines

Tasks and topics for oral language activities and text engagement should be authentic, relevant, and representative of different backgrounds, languages, interests, and life experiences.

Materials present multilingualism as an asset in reading, and students are explicitly encouraged to develop home language literacy and to use their home language strategically for learning how to negotiate texts in the target language.

Teacher materials should include instruction on how to garner information that will aid in learning, including the family’s preferred language of communication, schooling experiences in other languages, literacy abilities in other languages, and previous exposure to academic or everyday English.

Materials contain scaffolds designed to foster student independence by providing support when needed and removed when the student can access disciplinary concepts or perform disciplinary skills independently.

Student and teacher materials provide a broad repertoire of strategies for constructing meaning from disciplinary texts and discussions.

Teacher materials and rubrics that emphasize the purpose of a writing task, and not the mode of writing (e.g. compare/contrast), should be given primary emphasis in the presentation of tasks.

Writing tasks should encourage students to produce original text and guide them in doing so.

Writing tasks avoid relying heavily on fill-in-the-blank writing templates and formulaic guidelines (e.g. write a 5 paragraph letter requesting x, y, z).