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.
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:
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.