Designated and Integrated ELD – the Left and Right Hand of ELD Instruction
Since a high percentage of students in American schools these days are English learners, there has been an ongoing debate about how to meet their educational needs. One state, California, adopted its ELA/ELD Framework for instruction in 2014. It recommends a comprehensive approach to ELD instruction that involves two angles – Integrated ELD and Designated ELD. These are the left and right hand of ELD instruction because you can’t have one without the other. Every school needs both because every EL student needs both.
The instructional differences between the two can be summarized in three areas: 1) Time, 2) Focus, and 3) Standards.
| Instructional Differences | Integrated ELD | Designated ELD |
| TIME | Within regular classes in all content areas | Specific protected time during the school day |
| FOCUS | Content of lesson with language support | Language skills, using content from regular curriculum |
| STANDARDS | State content standards in tandem with ELD Standards | ELD Standards |
As you can see in the table, Integrated ELD is focused on content with language support, while Designated ELD is focused on language skills using content for examples. Also, the Designated ELD may have specially qualified teachers and may group the students by their language proficiency as Emerging, Expanding, or Bridging.
The Framework provides vignettes that make the difference between the two more clear. Here are a few examples by grade level:
| Grade | Integrated ELD | Designated ELD |
| 2 | Teacher clarifies the language used while prompting for textual evidence to support inferences. | Teachers helps students examine author’s use of verbs to convey how a character is feeling. |
| 3 | Teacher helps students summarize informational text in science | Teacher helps students analyze complex sentences from the science text |
| 4 | Teacher leads class in grammar and vocab used in biographies and they write a bio of Martin Luther King Jr. | Teacher helps students, in groups, learn new terms used in the biography unit |
| 5 | Teacher guides students in researching and writing reports on ecosystems | Teacher helps ELs identify words and phrases that create cohesion in the texts they’ve read on ecosystems |
| 6 | Teacher guides close reading of memoir on “Making of a Scientist” | Teacher guides students to analyze the language of the text. |
| 7 | Team teach a unit on “You are what you eat” and close read informational text | Teachers help students analyze text organization and persuasive language used in text |
| 8-10 | Team teach a unit on freedom of speech including primary sources | Teacher supports ELs in discussing the issues of the debate |
| 9-10 | Team teach a unit on diverse perspectives in world literature using Things Fall Apart | Teachers help ELs analyze language patterns from history texts such as abstraction, agency, and causal relationships |
| 11-12 | Teacher explores perspectives about Civil Rights movement using Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee | Teacher helps ELs unpack sentences and understand words that take new noun forms in the text |
ELD Instruction is no longer a matter of accommodating English learners in the content area class, and it’s no longer pulling them out into a special language class. The fastest way to bring English learners into full proficiency is to do both. We need to support them with the left hand and the right hand. That’s how we give them a helping hand!
For more information, view the California ELA/ELD Framework at http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/rl/cf/
For more information on how Dataworks can help teachers make the most of both Integrated and Designated ELD instruction, check out the book Explicit Direct Instruction for English Learners, which offers 50 strategies that teachers can adopt in their teaching to make their delivery comprehensible.
6 Things to Know About ELD Instruction
In this article, we highlight 6 important things to know about ELD instruction. They include definitions, content covered for integrated ELD, EL instructional strategies, ELD proficiency levels, concepts covered for Designated ELD, and common problems in current ELD teaching. Download our powerful 19 pages special report today. See the report.
