Guideline 1

Interactive oral language development

Interactive oral language development activities (including speaking and listening) build opportunities for students to engage with grade-level content and to develop disciplinary practices and knowledge of the subject matter.

Guideline 2

Writing activities engage students in discussions

Writing activities engage students in discussions of topics and prompts with peers and teacher throughout and as an integral part of the writing process.

Guideline 5

Learn language through prolonged exposure

Materials reflect the understanding that students learn language through prolonged exposure along with opportunities to negotiate content and ideas in the target language, with scaffolds and supports for further development as needed.

Guideline 8

Learner awareness

Student materials ensure learner awareness (metacognitive strategies) to guide reflection on their own learning.

Guideline 14

Consistent formative assessment and feedback strategies

Materials provide teacher guidance for consistent formative assessment and feedback strategies that support students’ language proficiencies and content understanding.

Specification 1B

Teacher materials provide guidance on how to engage students in productive and sustained academic discussions in which students negotiate meaning (ask and answer questions) and co-construct knowledge about grade-level texts and content.

Specification 2A

Writing activities are centered on specific shared texts so all students have shared content for orally communicating about disciplinary content, negotiating meaning collaboratively, gathering evidence from those texts, and other learning activities.

Specification 5C

Materials should contain scaffolds (e.g. visual organizers, sentence frames/starters, hands-on materials, role-plays) to support students' developing academic reasoning skills.

Specification 8B

Materials support students in noticing and comprehending sentences that are either essential for understanding the reading or that represent challenging structures. Syntax development should be an explicit and regular focus in reading tasks, and that focus should occur in the context of collaboratively working with meaningful texts.

Specification 8J

Student materials provide opportunities for students to analyze, reflect on, and improve their own writing (meta-awareness) using models, rubrics, and other reflection tools.

Specification 14A

Teacher materials guide formative assessment and feedback strategies for teachers during student-led discussions and presentations. The materials should guide teachers to assess students’ oral language abilities, content knowledge, and disciplinary practices and to determine how students need support in developing the concepts, practices, and oral language to express them.