- How can I use information about my students’ English language proficiency levels on different
CA ELD Standards, as well as other relevant information, to design and provide targeted
instruction that fosters language-rich learning opportunities? - How often should I assess ELD progress? Which kinds of evidence-gathering approaches and
tools are most appropriate for different purposes? - How will I know if my EL students are making sufficient progress in developing English on a
daily or weekly basis and over longer periods of time? - How can I include my EL students in assessing their own ELD progress and support them to be
conscious of and intentional in their English language learning?
Guidance for addressing these questions follows. This guidance focuses on how classroom
teachers—including ELA teachers, teachers in other content areas, ELD teachers, and EL specialists
who support content teachers—can use the CA ELD Standards to assess the ELD progress of each
of their EL students. The CA ELD Standards support teachers’ formative assessment practices by
offering descriptions of what EL students can be expected to do at the end of each English language
proficiency level (Emerging, Expanding, Bridging). These expectations help teachers focus their
formative assessment practices as EL students use English while learning content, gauge their EL
students’ developing capacities in English, and adjust instruction and learning opportunities. The CA
ELD Standards also support teachers in their assessment of learning and to use this information for
formative purposes. The examples offered here are intended to be used in addition to—not instead
of—those provided in the rest of this chapter.
Assessing ELD Progress in Writing
One way teachers can observe and respond to their EL students’ development of written language
is by using a language analysis framework for writing, based on the CA ELD Standards and aligned
to teachers’ learning goals and success criteria for writing. A language analysis framework allows
teachers to observe and analyze student language in linguistic terms with more specificity than is
often found in ELA rubrics or other tools for evaluating writing. For example, feedback to students on
writing, such as “interesting beginning, developed middle, and satisfying conclusion,” “could use more
varied sentence patterns,” or “needs some colorful vocabulary” may be sufficient for some students to
improve their writing. However, this feedback may not be explicit enough for many students, including
ELs, to act on (Fang and Wang 2011). Teachers providing this type of feedback may know intuitively
what kind of writing they would like to see their students produce, but without specific feedback
on the language resources that constitute “varied sentence patterns” or “colorful vocabulary,” their
feedback is elusive to ELs, and such language use remains a “hidden curriculum” (Christie 1999).
A language analysis framework for writing, drawing from the CA ELD Standards and other
resources focused on language development, helps teachers provide a level of explicitness about the
specific language resources that students can use in their academic writing to meet identified learning
goals and success criteria in different disciplines. A language analysis framework provides framing
questions that students can ask themselves as they are writing and as they examine writing. Guidance
for composing and revising their writing can help students structure their texts cohesively and use
expected grammatical structures and vocabulary. Explicitly focusing on language makes expectations
for writing more transparent. Teachers can also use a language analysis framework to determine how
well students use particular language resources in a piece of writing to provide useful feedback to
students and adjust instruction accordingly. An example of a language analysis framework for writing
in the upper elementary grades, developed using the CA ELD Standards and their English language
proficiency descriptors (CDE 2014), as well as research on language development, is provided in figure
8.7.
Assessment Chapter 8 | 851