Overview
Designated English Language Development (D-ELD) is a required protected time (a minimum of 30 minutes daily) to support multilingual learners (or ELLs) to achieve English proficiency until reclassification. During this time, students are grouped by English language proficiency for instruction.
Every lesson has a language objective and emphasizes student language production using collaborative structures in which students have multiple opportunities to use the focal language and receive real-time authentic modeling and feedback. While all students are developing language proficiency, multilingual learners (students that are learning English as an additional language) need specific and systematic instruction about language.
Priority Standards
What students will know, what students will do, and what thinking skills students will develop to apply and transfer English Language Development understandings that endure within the discipline, leverage deeper understandings, and/or support readiness for success at the next grade level.
In fourth grade, focus on these critical areas:
Interacting In Meaningful Ways
- Collaborative & Productive: Exchanging information and ideas, offering opinions, and supporting ideas & opinions through collaborative discussion
- Interpretive & Productive: Listening actively and reading & viewing closely a wide variety of text and other media. Asking and answering detailed questions, restating & paraphrasing - describing ideas, experiences, and key details. Planning and presenting brief oral presentations - retelling texts and recounting experiences using complete sentences and keywords with a scaffold
Learning How English Works
- Text Structure: Apply understanding of how texts are organized and use connecting words or phrases (first, next, last, etc.)
- Using Verbs & Verb Phrases: Present participle, past tense to retell or recount an experience, simple present tense to describe or explain
- Using Nouns & Noun Phrases and Modifying to Add Details: Adjectives, prepositions, or prepositional phrases to expand sentences (e.g., time, manner, place, cause)
- Connecting Ideas: Use conjunctions to make compound and complex sentences
Using Foundational Literacy Skills
- Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words.
- Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension.
- Students in Spanish biliteracy and dual language programs need sound transfer skills and crosslinguistic transfer.
Instruction: Signature Elements
Below are signature elements of SFUSD English Language Development instruction that students should experience regularly throughout fourth grade as they develop as English readers, writers, speakers, & listeners.
Language Objectives
Multilingual learners, like all students, benefit when they know they will learn and what is expected from them. All lessons throughout the day should have a clear language objective.
Foundational Skills Routines (as needed)
Quick routines to introduce/teach/review phonological knowledge (letter names, sounds, phonemic awareness, high-frequency words, etc.)
Explicitly Teach Language-Specific Skills
Language instruction should focus on one of the three levels of academic language:
- Word/Phrase: verbs (simple present/past tense), adjectives, and prepositional phrases (e.g., time, manner, place, cause)
- Sentence Structure: descriptive sentences, complex sentences (using familiar subordinate conjunctions - because, though, since, etc.)
- Text Structure: Using appropriate text organization, collaboratively and with increasing independence write longer literary and informational texts.
Collaboration & Engagement
The teacher guides students into discussions/conversations about the focal language. Students have multiple opportunities to use the focal language in a collaborative structure.
Formative Assessment
Create opportunities for students to demonstrate their learning. For fourth grade, days 1-4 should focus on oral production and day 5 should focus on the written form where students use the learned language specific in the week.
Materials
Below are items you should have to support your students' English Language Development instruction. If you are missing anything from the list, please first contact your site administrator or designated support. If they are unable to resolve the issue promptly, please contact the SFUSD Multilingual Pathways ELD Team.
- Digital Wonders Materials (how to access)
- Class Set of Wonders Workbooks
- Academic conversation posters
- First Four Weeks Academic Conversations
- MPD Newcomers Guidance
English Language Development Units
Planning Guide
Reflection Questions
- How are students' developmental needs, communities, and experiences being reflected and honored, or how could they be?
- What opportunities do you see for developing equitable access & demand, inquiry, collaboration, and assessment for learning?
- What are the implications for your own practice? What strengths can you build upon? What will you do first?
Want More?
Standards
More Resources
- Reclassification
- Collaboration: Getting Started
- Assessment: Exit Ticket Observation Tool
- Guiding Principals for Dual Language Program
Contact the Multilingual Pathways ELD Team:
This page was last updated on May 17, 2023