- Create a welcoming classroom environment that exudes respect for cultural and linguistic
diversity. - Get to know students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds and how individual students
interact with their primary language, home dialect, and home cultures. - Use the primary language or home dialect of English, as appropriate, to acknowledge
them as valuable assets and to support all learners to fully develop academic English and
engage meaningfully with the core curriculum - Use texts that accurately reflect students’ cultural and social backgrounds so that students
see themselves in the curriculum. - Continuously expand their understandings of culture and language so as not to
oversimplify approaches to culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogy. (For guidance
on implementing culturally and linguistically responsive teaching, see chapters 2 and 9 of
this ELA/ELD Framework.)
Meaning Making
Meaning making is at the very heart of ELA/literacy and ELD
instruction. This section includes a focus on standards that relate
to meaning making, provides information about comprehension
of complex text, and briefly discusses comprehension strategies.
As in other grade spans, the focus on meaning making cuts
across the strands of CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy and the ELD
Standards in grades two and three. Each strand (ELA/Literacy)
or part (ELD) in both sets of standards emphasizes the primacy
of meaning in ELA/literacy and ELD instruction.
Prior to entering the grades two and three span, children
learned that reading, writing, speaking, and listening are
meaningful acts. They had many experiences making meaning
with text and in other communicative exchanges. In transitional
kindergarten through grade one, they participated in and demonstrated meaning making by asking
and answering questions about key details in a text (RL/RI.K–1.1). They learned to retell grade-level
stories and key details of informational text and to demonstrate understanding of a text’s central
message or main idea (RL/RI.K–1.2). They revealed their comprehension as they described characters,
settings, and major events in literary text and connections among elements of informational text
(RL/RI.K–1.3), and they used information from illustrations to make meaning (RL/RI.K–1.7). They
compared and contrasted adventures and experiences of characters in stories and identified basic
similarities in and differences between two informational texts on the same topic (RL/RI.K–1.9).
By grade one, with prompting and support, they read grade-level prose, poetry, and informational
texts, and they learned to activate prior knowledge related to the content of the texts and confirm
predictions about what will happen next (RL/RI.1.10).
In the transitional kindergarten through grade one span, they also learned that writing is used to
communicate opinions, information/explanations, and narratives as they shared their thoughts and
understandings through drawings and dictation and by employing their developing knowledge of the
alphabetic code (W.K–1, Standards 1–3). They learned to participate in collaborative conversations
in small and large groups, asking and answering questions to make meaning, and to present their
understandings to others (SL.K–1, Standards 1–6). And, they began to learn about and gain command
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