Effective eld programs

Reading Word Analysis. Vocabulary Development. Reading Comprehension. Literary Response and Analysis. Writing Strategies and Applications. Writing: English Language Conventions. ELD Standards for Grades Writing: Language Conventions.

English learners clearly have certain needs that native English speaking students do not have, and require some degree of special attention in order to meet those needs. However, the goal is to have English learners succeed in mainstream classrooms. This is where the balance between pull out ELD classes and mainstream support gets very complex. The type of ELD support provided in schools across the country varies drastically, and although sometimes it may be based on clear parameters such as grade level, other times, it may be based on a misinterpreted idea of what is best for English learners.

At our own school site, as well as our combined years of experience in other schools and grade levels, we have tried a range of ELD service types. We will later explain where we are currently in terms of ELD at our own site, as we feel we have arrived at our most successful model during this most recent school year.

Depending on grade level, an ELD institute might be a class period, or a portion of the school day if you are working with elementary level students. The instruction is targeted at the various levels of the students, and its sole purpose is providing the students with explicit English language instruction; teaching them how the language works.

In school settings where there is a large number of English learners, like our current middle school, classes may be broken down by level. This model has had some success, as we are able to break our classes down into more targeted levels. The concept of making this class culturally relevant for our students is also crucial. We have students coming from so many linguistic and cultural backgrounds, which we want to honor and use as a source of strength for our students to succeed in acquiring English.

We will touch on this cultural relevance piece in more detail later. We also have another lower level ELD class held with a different teacher at the same time as the newcomer class, so that we can move students up a level according to their progress to move any quickly advancing newcomers up to higher level skills, while keeping space open in the newcomer-only class for our students that arrive throughout the school year.

We also have higher level ELD classes throughout the day, and create these rosters and class objectives based on the students that we have year to year. It is also important to remember that we have two full time ELD teachers on site, something that we fought for by presenting the need with the support of data to our administration. We have a large English learner population, so the need for two full time ELD teachers was extremely evident, and was not a difficult sell to our administration.

In some of our own elementary teaching experiences, we tried to have a designated ELD institute or class during regular school hours, before school and after school, each with their own set of challenges. Instructional materials for designated ELD classrooms were purchased from the provider of current ELA materials to ensure alignment of practices and terminology for both teachers and students.

In addition, we purchased a program for progress monitoring English language proficiency throughout the year. Professional development for implementing effective ELD instructional programs was scheduled for teachers, special education staff, instructional coaches, and administrators. We began with a two-day retreat in contextualized instructional strategies. Training and support continued throughout the year during early-out days and with our instructional coaches.

We met with the central office leadership team, parent groups, and our local school board. Information regarding our new ELD program was disseminated through the district website and we created a community brochure. Before the new school year began we had to guarantee our office had a strong system for student screening and paperwork flow at the elementary schools.

This was the first year ELD teachers would be administering the WIDA Screener , an English language proficiency assessment, at the school sites to determine if students from homes where another language was spoken needed support for developing their English proficiency. In addition, our Language Usage Survey, designed to determine languages other than English used in the home, had become a part of the online registration process, and we needed to make certain front-line staff had the information required to make informed decisions to support the ELD staff and to help parents.

At the start, eight students were proficient in English districtwide, all of them at the secondary level.