Literacy Content Block - Grades Four and Five

Basic Principles of Instruction

The following Basic Principles of Instruction apply to all areas of the Literacy Content Block. Effective instruction in each area is characterized by these principles.

• Provide direct, explicit, systematic, and sequential instruction.
  
• Incorporate multimodal strategies and plan for students’ active engagement.
  
• Provide instruction in whole-group and small-group settings and ensure opportunities for individual and paired practice, exploration, and interaction with the content.
  
• Support and strengthen speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills for all learners across all content areas.
  
• Recognize, value, and build from students’ strengths, interests, cultures, languages, backgrounds, and ways of expressing knowledge and skills (e.g., language, gesturing, drawing, role playing).
  
• Motivate students by providing appropriately challenging and culturally and linguistically authentic and relevant materials and activities. Provide choice and plentiful access to print materials and books representing diverse genres, authors, topics, and languages, connect content to students’ lives, and ensure that students see themselves as successful learners.
  
• Monitor progress and provide timely feedback, instruction, and intervention as needed.
  
• Provide comprehensive ELD instruction—iELD and dELD—for students identified as EL students that builds on their language and cultural assets and responds to the linguistic demands of ELA and content instruction.
  
• Provide supports, accommodations, modifications, and/or supplementary aids and services required by a child’s individualized education plan (IEP) or Section 504 plan and collaborate with families and, as appropriate, education specialists.
  

Literacy Area 1: Language

Language—heard, spoken, signed, read, and written—is the primary means by which humans communicate, and it is the cornerstone of literacy and learning. It is with and through language that students learn, think, and receive and express ideas, information, perspectives, and questions. Attention to language development occurs in all content areas, both informally and formally. Language is enriched when students have daily opportunities to interact with adults and one another and with texts as speakers, listeners, readers, and writers; when
all students are comfortable contributing to conversations and feel heard and respected; and when all languages are valued and recognized as assets. Formal instruction includes, but is not limited to, teaching the meaning of words and word parts (e.g., affixes, root words), how phrases and sentences are organized to convey meaning, and oral and written conventions that contribute to meaning (e.g., grammar, punctuation, capitalization). Students learn that language is purposeful and changes according to context, audience, and task.

Recommended Duration: Language development is integrated within instruction in all literacy and language areas and other subjects daily. Accordingly, a specific time allocation is not recommended; however, time for focused language instruction, such as vocabulary, should be incorporated within foundational literacy skills and integrated reading and writing based on students’ needs and the nature of the texts and lesson activities. Each of these practices is appropriate for iELD; see the section Comprehensive ELD for more information.

Evidence-Based Practices

• Engage students in daily collaborative conversations in which they share opinions, experiences, and information; respond to texts and topics; and listen to and ask questions of others.
  
• Engage students in listening to and reading a wide range of texts and selections of texts that include known and new words and concepts across content areas and literary genres.
  
• Read aloud daily from texts that enrich and expand students’ language, including those that expose students to a variety of language structures (e.g., sentences, grammar, vocabulary), and pause to highlight and support students’ understanding of complex text and language structures by breaking apart the ideas in sentences and reassembling them.
  
• Promote the use of a wide range of vocabulary and sentence structures in context by providing speaking and writing exercises that encourage students to apply new words and language in collaborative and individual tasks (e.g., sentence frames, writing in response to a text or topic, presentations, retelling of stories, songs, chants, pictures).
  
• Use a direct and explicit vocabulary routine (e.g., introduce the word, supply a student-friendly explanation, share examples and non-examples and prompt students to do the same) to teach specific words, especially those that are used in reading selections or are important for a topic under study. Provide multiple opportunities for students to use those words in meaningful contexts and varied groupings.
  
• Increase exposure to and understanding of disciplinary language structures (i.e., vocabulary, grammatical, and organizational structures) through rich and varied language experiences and supports (e.g., books, learning experiences, discussions, presentations, graphic organizers, word banks, sentence frames).
  
• Teach and emphasize morphology and the use of word parts (e.g., affixes, roots) to understand word meanings, similarities across words, and word structure.
  
• Teach students how to use print and digital resources (e.g., glossaries, dictionaries, thesauruses) to determine or clarify word meanings.
  
• Discuss how language functions in different contexts (e.g., how speaking to family and friends is different from speaking with teachers) and how to adjust language choices to audience, task, and purpose.
  
• Emphasize crosslinguistic transfer by drawing connections to cognates (i.e., words that are similar across languages, such as “problem” in English and “problema” in Spanish) and other features of the child’s home language to support learning of English.
  
• Draw attention to grammatical differences between the primary language(s) of students and English (e.g., word order differences, such as “red car” and “coche rojo”; neutral and gendered nouns and adjectives, such as “black cat” and “gato negro” or “gata negra”).
  
• Explicitly teach grammatical structures and practice using them in discussions with supports (e.g., sentence frames focusing on perfect verb tenses, such as “I working on the project since last week.” and “By the time the project is due, I working on it for two weeks.”).
  
• Teach, scaffold, and highlight in texts the conventions of General American English grammar and usage, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling during instruction.
  
• Highlight dialectical variations students may be familiar with and draw connections to General American English grammar.
  
• Include a range of learning supports (e.g., pictures, realia, graphic organizers, use of cognates when applicable).
  

Literacy Area 2: Foundational Literacy Skills

Foundational literacy skills instruction is necessary to develop students’ understanding and working knowledge of print concepts, phonological awareness, phonics and word recognition, and fluency (the “Foundational Skills” of reading as presented in the CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy). Because printing and spelling are intimately tied to these skills, evidence-based practices regarding their instruction are included in this area, broadened to “Foundational Literacy Skills.” The purpose of foundational literacy skills instruction is to ensure students can identify printed words (decode) in meaningful connected text and translate oral language into written language (encode). The ultimate goal is for students to develop automaticity—recognizing words nearly effortlessly so that cognitive resources can be devoted to meaning making. The achievement of the foundational literacy skills is crucial, warranting high priority instructional attention in the early school years and thereafter as needed.

Recommended Duration: 30–45 minutes of daily instructional time across all foundational literacy skills below and based on students’ needs.

Print Concepts

Print concepts are the organization and basic features of print. Instruction ensures that students learn how print works. Ideally, nearly all basic print concepts and letter formation skills are acquired by the end of kindergarten and are addressed in subsequent grades as needed or as called for with the introduction of a new language. Basic concepts about print include identification of a book’s front and back covers and title page, directionality of print, use of spacing, recognition of uppercase and lowercase letters, the connection between spoken and written language, and the function of capitalization and punctuation. Students also learn how to print letters so they can use them as writers. They develop fluent printing, and cursive in grades three and above, through practice and multiple opportunities to write.

Print concepts are taught primarily in transitional kindergarten, kindergarten, and grade one. Some students may need additional support or intervention beyond grade one. See the standards and blocks for previous grades as needed.

Evidence-Based Practices

• Explicitly teach and reinforce identified areas of need using evidence-based practices from previous grade levels.
  
• Explicitly identify differences and similarities between the writing systems (e.g., direction of print, symbols, punctuation) of English and the languages of multilingual learners. iELD
  

Phonological/Phonemic Awareness

Phonological awareness is the ability to consciously attend to and manipulate the sound units (e.g., syllables, onsets, rimes, phonemes) in spoken words. Phonemic awareness, the most advanced level of phonological awareness, is the ability to focus on and manipulate the individual sounds (i.e., phonemes) in spoken words; its achievement is significantly related to reading acquisition and success.

Phonological/phonemic awareness concepts are taught in transitional kindergarten, kindergarten, and grade one. Phonemic awareness is a necessary building block in the progression of reading and writing skills acquisition and is therefore a high priority for students who need additional support or intervention beyond grade one. See the standards and content blocks for previous grades as needed.

Evidence-Based Practices

• Explicitly teach and reinforce critical phonemic awareness skills (e.g., oral blending and segmentation), if needed, using evidence-based practices from previous grade levels.
  
• Emphasize crosslinguistic transfer between languages, explicitly noting sounds that exist in both English and a student’s primary language and those that are unique to each language (e.g., the sound /s/ exists in both spoken English and Spanish whereas /sh/ is heard in spoken English but not in Spanish; /p/ is an English sound that does not exist in Arabic). Incorporate additional articulation practice for sounds that are not used in both languages. iELD
  

Phonics and Word Recognition

Phonics and word recognition include knowledge of sound–symbol correspondences; knowledge of word parts (syllables and morphemes); and recognition of irregularly spelled words. Learners use this knowledge to identify printed words (i.e., decode). They also use this knowledge to transfer spoken language into print (i.e., encode), which includes representing speech sounds with symbols and learning to spell.

Evidence-Based Practices

• Provide direct, explicit, and systematic instruction in phonics and word recognition using a scope and sequence.
  
• Reinforce, as needed, students’ ability to apply their knowledge of the relationship between sounds and spellings and their phonemic awareness to decode and encode. Model and use hand motions and manipulatives, such as letter tiles and whiteboards, to scaffold the application of the skill.
  
• Review, teach as needed, and continue to reinforce students’ knowledge and application of different syllable types and common affixes as they decode and encode.
  
• Teach students to decode and encode Greek and Latin affixes and roots using a variety of strategies, such as manipulating cards with word parts to form new words, word sorts, and word building. Teach meanings at the same time, using word maps, visuals, actions, multiple examples, and connections to home languages or dialects.
  
• Teach decoding and encoding of multisyllabic words using instructional routines (e.g., first look for affixes, then find vowels, determine syllable types, and decode chunk by chunk and blend together). Model and provide students with regular practice tackling unfamiliar, complex multisyllabic words. Reteach spelling patterns, syllable types, and word parts (affixes and roots) as needed.
  
• Teach flexibility in decoding, given the variation in English orthography, so that students are comfortable making more than one attempt to pronounce a word. For example, generally the first syllable in a two-syllable word with a single medial consonant (i.e., an open syllable) is pronounced with the long vowel (e.g., baker, diner, polar). However, this is not always the case (e.g., wagon, comic, lemon). Have students practice with examples and non-examples of generalizations and ensure they listen for real words and words that make sense. Promoting a flexible approach to applying taught word analysis skills, reading for meaning, and drawing on a rich vocabulary contribute to successful decoding, despite variations in English orthography.
  
• Check students’ understanding of words that are anticipated to be new and scaffold as needed. Demonstrate word meanings by using visuals, demonstrating actions, using the words in multiple sentences and contexts, and making connections to home language or dialect. iELD
  
• Link spelling instruction with phonics and word recognition instruction by having students write words with the patterns and word parts they are learning to decode.
  
• Use multimodal instruction (e.g., whiteboards, anchor words, sound–spelling cards, embedded mnemonics, visuals, magnetic letters)
  
• Teach high-frequency, irregularly spelled words (i.e., those that contain elements that have not yet been taught or do not follow the most common sound–symbol correspondences, such as “people”). Use strategies that emphasize known sound–symbol correspondences and explicitly highlight the irregular elements (e.g., most spellings are regular in “people,” but the /ē/ spelled “eo” is not). Check that students understand the meaning of the words and provide explanations as needed.
  
• Draw on words in students’ oral vocabulary and build new vocabulary that reflects the phonics and word recognition skills being taught.
  
• Provide repeated practice (both teacher directed and independent) of taught skills by having students read words containing learned spelling patterns and affixes in context and in isolation and engage them in word-building activities during foundational skills instruction. It is particularly important for EL students that teachers explicitly define words and phrases to support meaning making. iELD
  
• Support students in building automaticity (i.e., automatic, nearly effortless decoding) in reading and spelling words containing taught spelling patterns and word parts and rapid recognition of irregularly spelled words by practicing in many meaningful contexts (e.g., in different books, on charts). These become “sight” words in that they are read without conscious effort. Check that students understand the meaning of the words and provide explanations as needed.
  
• Provide daily authentic opportunities for students to write on topics and in formats of their choice and within content instruction, so they apply the phonics, spelling, and other word recognition skills (e.g., morphological analysis) they are learning.
  
• Explicitly identify transferable sound–symbol correspondences between English and the languages of multilingual learners (e.g., the letter “n” represents the sound /n/ in both Spanish and English) and explicitly note the non-transferable sound–symbol patterns (e.g., the letter “j” represents the /h/ sound in Spanish and the /j/ sound in English). iELD
  

Reading Fluency

Fluency is seemingly effortless reading. Words and phrases are accessed quickly. Fluency consists of word recognition accuracy, appropriate rate, and prosody (i.e., expression, which includes rhythm, phrasing, and intonation) and reflects freedom from word-identification difficulties that might hinder comprehension in silent reading or the expression of ideas in oral reading. Writing fluency (printing and, in grade three and above, cursive) is addressed in the sections Print Concepts and Writing.

Evidence-Based Practices

• Provide opportunities for fluency practice with a variety of texts, especially grade-level texts for all students (with ample support as needed), in a variety of settings (whole group, small group, partner, and independent).
  
• Use linguistically and culturally relevant and authentic texts connected to students’ experiences to support fluency.
  
• Foster reading motivation and enjoyment to promote engagement. Draw on and spark students’ interests and provide a choice of reading materials.
  
• Model reading with appropriate expression and pacing, emphasizing meaning making and thinking aloud. Check that students understand the meaning of the words and phrases and provide explanations as needed. iELD
  
• Include repeated reading for authentic reasons, such as preparing for an oral performance (e.g., echo reading, choral reading, readers’ theater, poetry presentations, author’s chair) and different purposes (e.g., identifying unknown words, finding the answer to a teacher-posed question, preparing to summarize with a partner).
  
• Revisit phonics and word recognition instruction as needed to ensure accurate word identification. Provide practice opportunities to support students’ development of nearly effortless application of word recognition skills so attention can be devoted to meaning.
  

Literacy Area 3: Integrated Reading and Writing

Reading and writing practices are complementary and, when taught in conjunction, support and strengthen one another. Students’ comprehension of text is improved when they discuss and write about what they read. Likewise, students’ writing is improved when they read (or listen to) and discuss an author’s language or organizational choices in high-quality texts. Students also benefit when teachers model the writing process and teach spelling and sentence construction skills. Integrating reading and writing provides important opportunities to build knowledge, enhance language, and develop effective communication in ELA and across the curriculum.

Recommended Duration: 60–75 minutes of daily instructional time, based on students’ assessed needs with at least 30 minutes devoted to writing. Opportunities to write are intentionally integrated into all content areas.

Reading: Engaging with Text

Engaging with text meaningfully opens worlds for learners. By understanding, analyzing, and responding to texts (orally and in writing)—with the help of appropriate scaffolding—students enhance their ability to make meaning, build knowledge in all content areas, develop receptive and expressive language, and reinforce foundational literacy skills. Students experience increasingly complex text by listening to read-alouds and reading with the teacher and independently. Reading a variety of texts provides models of creative expression and author’s craft, allows students to pursue interests, and builds an appreciation of diverse perspectives and cultures.

Evidence-Based Practices

• Integrate reading, writing, and discussion to enhance comprehension of text and build knowledge and language.
  
• Promote reading volume by ensuring that students read every day to practice specific skills and strategies they are learning and to expand their worlds and language and develop empathy.
  
• Engage students with rich literary and informational texts highlighting key vocabulary, disciplinary language structures, concepts, themes, or visuals. Follow up by having students use language from the text in a variety of ways (e.g., participating in high-quality discussions taking on different roles, writing using sentence and paragraph frames, creating artwork). iELD
  
• Model thinking aloud about a text, demonstrating inference making and drawing attention to language use and text organization. Engage students in guided, paired, and individual practice in inference making and observations of the author’s craft with different text types.
  
• Share books that reflect students’ interests and identities as well as the curricula (both literacy and other content areas).
  
• Ensure all students have regular opportunities to engage as readers with grade-level (or above, as appropriate) text with scaffolding, such as modeling how to navigate unfamiliar concepts, vocabulary, and language structures; prompting students to apply taught word analysis skills; prompting purposeful rereading; and asking questions and facilitating discussion to ensure meaning making.
  
• Engage students with a wide variety of increasingly complex texts across content areas to expose them to discipline-specific language, structures, and ideas and to make visible the role of literacy in other subjects.
  
• Share a range of text types and highlight their organizational structures (e.g., sequence, cause and effect, compare and contrast, description). Include supports such as story maps and graphic organizers. Include texts that build knowledge and language.
  
• Identify and teach vocabulary and language structures critical to students’ understanding of texts they read by providing friendly definitions, rich examples, and visuals, props, or actions as applicable. iELD
  
• Ask text-dependent questions, including literal and inferential questions, to guide and build comprehension and prompt students to generate questions about a literary or informational text.
  
• Model and teach students to use comprehension strategies before, during, and after reading a text. Strategies may include activating prior knowledge, prompting students to make predictions, setting purposes for reading, preteaching critical vocabulary, demonstrating comprehension monitoring, pausing and asking students to retell a section or share an inference with a peer, or guiding students to create summaries.
  
• Incorporate routines and procedures that increase thinking about and discussing a text (e.g., turn and talk, think-pair-share, reciprocal teaching) and encourage multiple and extended exchanges.
  
• Use think-alouds to model text deconstruction (i.e., examining and discussing parts of sentences or texts) to increase comprehension by helping students understand how words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs function in a text. iELD
  
• Teach students to monitor their comprehension. Model reflecting on meaning making while reading and have students pause periodically as they read to ask themselves questions about the text and to summarize text passages. Teach “fix-up” strategies, such as identifying unknown words, breaking sentences apart, and rereading. iELD
  
• Teach students to follow the logic of a text, including identifying evidence an author uses to support a point, by outlining, using a variety of graphic organizers, and emulating an author’s structure in their own writing.
  
• Teach, model, and provide time for students to write in response to texts to promote comprehension. Provide differentiated language supports for multilingual learners. Students at emerging levels of English may begin with oral language responses, draw and label in response to text, or use scaffolded sentences before composing more elaborate sentences or paragraphs. iELD
  
• Ensure accuracy in word recognition and intervene when appropriate (i.e., in the moment or after engaging with the text). Introduce and support students in decoding several challenging words prior to confronting them in a text.
  
• Engage students in project-based or thematic units (e.g., science, history– social science, topics of choice) that spark students’ interest, integrate literacy and content instruction, involve research, and culminate in written products or oral presentations to extend learning, build world knowledge, and promote collaboration and inquiry. Include the use of digital tools as appropriate.

Writing

The ability to write is an essential and empowering literacy skill, and instruction begins in the first years of schooling and extends through every grade level. Writing strengthens students’ understanding of the foundational literacy skills and enhances their understanding of texts and learning experiences. Moreover, the ability to write enables students to express themselves for purposes of communicating with others and for their own satisfaction. Writing takes many forms; it may be formal or informal, brief or lengthy, and dictated or composed independently or collaboratively. Writing is taught and practiced daily and is integrated in all content areas and includes writing over both extended and shorter time frames for varied audiences.

Evidence-Based Practices

• Integrate reading, writing, and discussion to enhance comprehension of text and build knowledge and language.
  
• Provide daily opportunities for formal and informal writing (e.g., journals, quickwrites, direct teaching lessons) of different types (e.g., opinion, informational, narrative) across content areas, including research projects. Offer writing choices.
  
• Teach and model components of the writing process (i.e., planning, drafting, sharing, revising, editing, and publishing), including the recursive nature of these processes.
  
• Teach specific writing skills, including conventions, word choice, and organization. Support students’ application of different skills (e.g., use of punctuation for clarity) and processes (e.g., experimenting with different word choices or sentence structures) in different content areas and contexts and for different purposes and audiences.
  
• Have students discuss and write about texts they read, topics they study, and personal experiences and interests. Provide opportunities for students to share and collaborate with peers.
  
• Promote fluency in cursive, keyboarding, spelling, and sentence construction through direct teaching and opportunities to practice and apply across content areas.
  
• Provide exemplar and mentor texts as models of text structures and author’s craft. Make explicit the organization of text types (e.g., opinion, informational, narrative) and engage students in deconstructing text (e.g., breaking down and analyzing) to identify specific text features, such as reasons, details, and dialogue.
  
• Provide opportunities for students to study and emulate effective features of exemplar texts (e.g., imitating how an author establishes a mood, describes a character, supports a claim).
  
• Teach students to elaborate on ideas in their written work by adding detail to support main ideas or themes. Use strategies such as sharing and discussing detailed sentences from familiar texts and having students collaborate to add relevant detail to sentences.
  
• Teach students to write complex sentences by sharing and analyzing examples of different sentence types and teaching strategies, such as sentence combining.
  
• Incorporate instructional scaffolds and learning supports, such as graphic organizers, sentence stems and frames, templates, and protocols to help students organize their thoughts and learn ways to express them.
  
• Teach students to write well-developed, multiple-paragraph texts in which they organize text logically and link ideas. Model, scaffold, and provide practice in different content areas. Provide frames (e.g., First , Then , Next , Finally ) and explanations (e.g., sequencing words) to support generation of written language. iELD
  
• Support students in developing and organizing texts appropriate to the task, purpose, and audience.
  
• Provide students with opportunities to give and receive feedback and strengthen their writing as needed by revising and editing throughout the writing process. Cocreate or provide and discuss with students rubrics, forms, checklists, or open-ended prompts to support self-reflection and feedback to peers.
  
• Have students share their writing with an audience (e.g., peers, families, other adults), rehearsing and reading their work aloud and witnessing the impact of their work on others.
  
• Emphasize crosslinguistic transfer and non-transfer: parts of speech and grammar, capitalization (e.g., days of the week are capitalized in English, but not in Spanish), punctuation (e.g., Spanish uses rotated question and exclamation marks at the beginning or inside of a sentence whereas English does not), and cognates (e.g., words that are similar across languages, such as “accident” in English and “accidente” in Spanish). iELD
  
• Engage students in project-based or thematic units, as described in the section Reading: Engaging with Text.
  

Literacy Area 4: Comprehensive ELD

Comprehensive ELD includes both integrated and designated ELD and constitutes part of core instruction for those identified as EL students. Comprehensive ELD is integrated into ELA and all other content instruction and builds on students’ cultural and linguistic assets. Through comprehensive ELD, EL students learn to use English purposefully, interact in meaningful ways, and understand how English works. The CA ELD Standards describe the knowledge, skills, and abilities that EL students need to access, engage with, and achieve in grade- level academic content. The standards include two major parts: Interacting in Meaningful Ways, organized by modes of communication (Collaborative, Interpretative, and Productive) and Learning About How English Works, organized by key language processes (Structuring Cohesive Texts, Expanding and Enriching Ideas, and Connecting and Condensing Ideas). The strategies below support the implementation of these standards.

Integrated ELD

Integrated ELD is provided throughout the school day in all content areas to ensure that EL students are able to understand and use English to access instruction. Integrated ELD means that teachers address specific ELD standards while they address literacy or other content standards. Through iELD students strengthen their abilities to use academic English as they simultaneously learn content. Truly integrated into daily instruction, iELD involves careful planning, intentional scaffolding, and close observation of EL students during lessons.

Recommended Duration and Frequency: Integrated in all lessons across the curriculum on a daily basis.

Evidence-Based Practices

• Examine planned texts and tasks to identify language that may be unfamiliar or challenging to students and identify opportunities to highlight and discuss vocabulary and language features both before (i.e., front-loading) and during lessons. Consider the background knowledge needed to understand the texts and tasks. Observe how students use the new language and adjust whole-group instruction or work with small groups to provide adequate and appropriate support.
  
• Analyze the language features and structure of a text (e.g., fable, poem, informational book, biography) and plan instruction to deepen students’ awareness, comprehension, and use of targeted vocabulary or language structures through teacher modeling, interactive read-alouds, guided discussions, and collaborative writing. For example, teach how an author uses adverbs to describe the “how” of actions (e.g., quickly, sadly, calmly).
  
• Help students use target vocabulary and language structures by providing planned and just-in-time scaffolds (e.g., student-friendly explanations or definitions, graphic organizers, pictures, sketches, realia, sentence starters or frames, word banks).
  
• Promote the use of vocabulary and phrases in context by encouraging students to apply new language in speaking and writing activities (e.g., singing songs, reciting chants and poems, describing pictures, retelling stories, sharing information, forming sentences) individually and with others.
  
• Scaffold and guide students’ engagement in extended peer conversations about texts or topics in which they ask and answer questions; build on one another’s ideas; make personal observations; offer alternate endings or opinions; act out, reconstruct, or retell a text; or create oral or written responses.
  
• Highlight crosslinguistic connections to build language awareness and enhance comprehension of text structures and language features (e.g., tracking print right to left in Farsi and left to right in English; placing adjectives after a noun in Arabic and before a noun in English; ensuring agreement of articles, nouns, and adjectives for gender and number in Spanish, “las sillas pequeñas,” and not doing so in English, “the little chairs”).
  
• Call attention to how a text that students are reading or listening to is organized (e.g., by story sequence or informational topic and details) and model how to organize writing accordingly using graphic organizers and visuals.
  
• Provide flexibility in pacing to attend to students’ processing time in English and to build vocabulary and background knowledge that native speakers of English likely already possess and that are essential to comprehension and production.
  

Designated ELD

Designated ELD is a protected time during the regular school day in addition to the literacy block. In dELD, teachers focus on specific ELD standards in ways that directly connect to and support content learning, including learning that happens during the literacy block. In addition to addressing the CA ELD Standards for Interacting in Meaningful Ways, dELD focuses particularly on the standards for Learning About How English Works. The purpose is to help EL students develop the critical English language skills, knowledge, and abilities needed for content learning in English, including literacy. Instruction in dELD should combine and build on the evidence-based practices identified for iELD, while providing opportunities to engage students with language more deeply, with more support and scaffolding, and in more detail based on their level of English language proficiency.

Recommended Duration and Frequency: Provided daily in connection with literacy or other content area instruction. Designated ELD is provided in addition to the literacy block; the amount of time is based on students’ needs and local context.

Evidence-Based Practices

• Group EL students for dELD, to the degree practicable, according to their level of English language proficiency and offer focused instruction designed to strengthen and expand existing language skills through collaborative and individualized activities followed by guided and independent practice. Ensure that dELD instruction also incorporates the strategies identified in iELD.
  
• Analyze the language demands of texts and tasks. Incorporate specific vocabulary and language structures that will be encountered in literacy activities and other content areas. Assess prior knowledge and activate, focus on, or build background information, key vocabulary, and language structures.
  
• Call students’ attention to specific language that expands and enriches ideas, such as verb tenses used in a lesson about weather. Encourage its use through rephrasing and prompts (e.g., “Yes, the wind blows. Because it happened yesterday, we say the wind blew.”; “Can you tell us about something else that happened yesterday?”; “Turn to your partner and work together to come up with a sentence.”).
  
• Incorporate activities that help students discover and understand how English works (e.g., word sorts, deconstructing and reconstructing text, teaching word parts and word families). For example, teach how the letter “s” is used at the end of many English nouns as a suffix to create a plural form.
  
• Use dELD time to front-load or revisit the content and language demands students will or have experienced in content lessons. For example, introduce or review essential vocabulary, use visuals and graphic organizers, and provide students support for collaborative discussion about new content.
  
• Help students understand complex sentences in literacy and other content areas by modeling how to unpack them into shorter sentences or phrases. An example drawn from a science text is the sentence, “The slow movement of tectonic plates, large pieces of Earth’s crust, toward one another causes the formation of mountain ranges.” The sentence can be broken into shorter sentences and displayed on sentence strips, (e.g., “Tectonic plates are large pieces of Earth’s crust.”; “Tectonic plates move.”; “Mountain ranges are formed when tectonic plates move toward one another.”). The class discusses the shorter sentences, and the teacher clarifies word meanings along the way (crust, formation, ranges) and also notes any special words or phrases that connect ideas within the original sentence (e.g., the word “causes” tells us that one thing makes another thing happen).
  
• Model and engage students in guided practice connecting and condensing ideas in shared language activities. Focus on commonly used phrases as well as connecting words or phrases (e.g., because, even though, while, since) to link ideas, events, or reasons and combine clauses.
  
• Model and engage students in guided practice expanding and enriching ideas in shared language activities by adding different types and tenses of verbs (e.g., walk or prance, does or did), adding new adjectives to nouns (e.g., large or enormous, good or terrific), and adding details with prepositional phrases (e.g., after the party, under the table).