Tag Archives: WIDA

Special Issue! Student Goal Setting for Linguistic Achievement -@NAELPAforELs

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On Tuesday August 6, 2024 I have the honor of participating in a panel moderated by Larry Ferlazzo to discuss student goal setting in a webinar by the National Association of English Language Program Administrators (NAELPA). It’s truly an honor. I wanted to document my contribution and welcome yours!

Most of my students would tell you that learning English is their number one goal for coming to school. Motivation is high. The need is forefront. But, how does someone go about learning another language? It’s a process. A beautiful process unique to every individual. But how do I get there? It’s taking so long. Am I making progress? How do I get to my destination?

My own pathway to bilingualism began with first learning a language then extended into learning about language learning. My interest was sparked as a child wondering what Mrs. Pla, a Puerto Rican mama in my church, was saying to her children, then I moved into 3 years of high school Spanish to go straight to Old Dominion University where I earned a B.A. in Spanish and ended with a M.A. in Applied Linguistics. With linguistics, the pieces fell into place, and I fell in love. I had a growing understanding for what I experienced in my previous 7+ years of Spanish language study. I was developing a meta-awareness of how I had been learning.

A meta-awareness is often described as ‘thinking about thinking.’ For second language learners, ‘thinking about thinking’ can be made even more specific, meta-cognitive linguistic awareness, which is thinking about the mental processes of language learning. How am I utilizing language right now? What does the next level of proficiency look like? How can I extend my language as I communicate? What degree of precision am I using with my word choice? General, specific, technical?

Explicitly teaching students to reflect & understand where they are, what comes next, and how they get to their destination stirs up autonomy and independence and motivation. This is how I support linguistic goal setting and meta cognitive linguistic awareness in my classroom:

First – Beginning of the Year

I teach in Virginia which along with 40 other states has adopted the WIDA standards framework as our measurement of language growth and progress. We use the Proficiency Level Descriptors (PLDs) to describe their current level of language development and what they can do with language at the discourse level, the sentence level, and word/phrase level. WIDA further explains the PLDs, “DISCOURSE involves the organization, cohesion, and density of language. At the SENTENCE level, we see increasing grammatical complexity, at the WORD/ PHRASE level a growing precision of language.

To know where you’re going, you have to know where you are. At the beginning of the year, I implement Emily Francis’ language awareness beginning of the year goal setting activity that she generously shares here on her class Facebook page Mrs. Francis’ ESL Class. I am constantly inspired by her and recommend all multilingual teachers to follow her on X @EmilyFrancisESL and Facebook to have a window into a masterclass of quality language instruction in action. Following her method, I have the students learn about the language levels and embedded language expectations. We discuss the rubric, highlight and engage the meanings of key terms, and circle their proficiency level on the rubrics according to their WIDA screener score sheet or ACCESS score sheet if they were tested the year prior. Then, students use the rubric as a sentence bank and guide, list 3 skills they can do at their current level, then write about what level they are reaching for. They do this across the tested four language domains, listening, reading, writing and speaking. My upper intermediate/ advanced classes do this activity and turn it into an essay with an introduction paragraph and a concluding paragraph. In the introduction paragraph they introduce themselves and describe their language journey answering Wh- questions: who, where, when, why, and how. In their concluding paragraph, they write about how they use and hope to use their bilingualism in their home, school, and community.

Next – Throughout the Year

The development of this meta-cognitive linguistic awareness requires ongoing modeling. In my classroom you might hear Oh! “This is level 3–look at these expanding sentences we are writing here by writing___.” Or “we will begin with reviewing level 1 general vocabulary and now expand into some level 2 phrases and level 3 more-precise vocabulary for this unit.” In time, I’ll begin to ask the students pointed, reflective questions. Or I may simply highlight an opportunity to extend or enhance meaning and ask them why did I highlight this section, an invite to discuss thinking about language use together. I celebrate courageous use of the language. And in time, they do too. My tip to begin to incorporate this meta-language in your instruction is to keep the Proficiency Level Descriptors open on your desk or posted where you work. Constantly have them where you can see them as you plan and grade, will result in you becoming increasingly familiar with them, so you can draw your student’s attention to them.

More formal feedback for projects and unit assignments reference the rubric again. I circle where I see the students on the rubric, and then also give the student specific feedback on one of the criteria DISCOURSE, SENTENCE, WORD/PHRASE that was excellent, citing their own work and then I give advice on another. Take a look here at my adapted WIDA rubric for beginners/intermediate and here for upper intermediate/ advanced. Do note, that these forms are based on the WIDA rubric and not endorsed by WIDA.

Then – Collaborative Goal Setting

Federal guidelines require divisions to measure student language growth annually, and WIDA states monitor student linguistic growth with the ACCESS for ELs exam. Prior to testing in February, my students and I conference together 1:1. My students and I collaborate, using this ACCESS goal setting tool that I created on Canva. Feel free to make a copy to customize for your needs and update from year to year. Once in Canva, go to “File” then click “Make a Copy.” I’m delighted to share that Dr. Andrea Honigsfeld & Margo Gottlieb are including this tool in their upcoming October 2024 publication Collaborative Assessment for Multilingual Learners & Teachers.

ACCESS Goals Setting Conferencing Tool
Upcoming publication by Margo Gottlieb & Andrea Honigsfeld which references the tool

As we conference, I follow the tool from the top down. I begin by explaining how language research shows that it can take 1-3 years to become proficient in social language and up to 5-7 years to become proficient in academic/ content language. This is key in situating long term growth expectations. We then discuss score history. Next, we revisit the most current level of language proficiency disaggregated by domain and overall. Scores may seem grossly off compared to the expressive language currently demonstrated in the classroom since those who have an ACCESS score took it a full calendar year prior. Or scores may mirror incremental growth. It all depends on the individual language journey. Last I ask my student to select one domain as a goal that the student in particular would like to increase. Then I also select a domain as a goal–usually (but not always) it is a different domain based of what I see the student can do in class. It’s a way I validate how I notice and consider in-class performance and efforts.

Check out what my dear friend and colleague Glory wrote. She used the tool for the first time the 2023-2024 school year.

Last – How do I get to my destination?

Upon receiving the scores, my student and I will once again conference 1:1. I am fortunate that in Virginia we receive our results in May/June. Usually this is a good time to touch base on their linguistic progress but also their academic progress and tentative scheduling for the next year. Students get very excited and will demand their turn. There are always aberrations that can be disappointing. This past year 2 students had microphone issues which dramatically lowered their speaking scores. Some had an “off” testing day(s). It opens the door to the conversation that we aren’t our test scores. Annual proficiency testing is a great tool for measuring annual progress, and it is just that–a tool. But most demonstrate progress in some capacity, and we celebrate.

I simply enjoy sitting with them individually and having a conversation before the summer break or for my graduates, talking about life after high school. Language learning is a process–it’s a beautiful process–and so are our relationships with each other. These 1:1 conversations have become my favorite times of the year. I’ll leave you with an example in use.

Coding is for all! For primary ESL students, too!

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My current lane is secondary ESL, however my first experience in preK-12 was in the primary grades. My National Board Certification is in English as a New Language (ages 3-12) and I spent 9 years teaching primary with a focus on sweet ESL students ages 4-5. To renew my original certification, I crafted a coding lesson for a group of “borrowed” students at the local primary school. Here are the slides that I created to support my lesson. Feel free to use them!

When I observed prior to teaching the guest lesson, I saw that the students were reviewing life cycles—YES! There’s an opportunity for sequencing! Perfect. What subject matter? Animals? Plants?

Corn! A big lump with knobs, it’s got the juice! No–that viral Tiktok video came out a year later. I had a better hook.

I pulled the kids into the lesson with a big bag of Maseca, which has a picture of corn on the front. Maseca is corn flour, primarily used by my hispanic families to make tortillas. In fact, they will often call corn flour by it’s company name, just as in English a person will say, do you have a Kleenex meaning facial tissue, they will say I bought Maseca, meaning, corn flour.

Maseca!

I then taught the life cycle of corn with beautiful images by Mommyhood Montessori Learning, purchase yours from her store on teacherspayteachers here.

In this lesson, I focused on the skill of debugging, that is, problem solving. For English language support, I taught the students to first identify what was missing and then, explain where it belongs. These students were Level 2 students and needed opportunities to extend their discourse. Explaining is one of WIDA’s Key Language Uses, it’s a prominent use of language across the curriculum as we see here in the Language of Science Standard and also, I’d add, the language of computer science.

Each student identified what was missing then we explained in chorus, “______ is missing! It is not where it belongs. It belongs after the ______.” See one of the five images on missing stages below.

The sprout is missing! It is not where it belongs. It belongs after the seed!

After the students practiced verbally identifying and explaining, we moved into the coding portion of the lesson. At what stage does the Harvester pick the corn? When it is ripe. I took them to Code.org’s free PreReader Express curriculum and introduced them to Lesson 5: “Programming the Harvester,” the students would program the harvester to pick the ripe corn.

Now these primary EL students had practice problem solving, they simply needed some simple, explicit vocabulary instruction before we watched the tutorial. We learned code, blocks, and attach.

Next, Code.org’s tutorial on the Harvester:

Result? The students were more than prepared! Using the same language that we used with the life cycle activity, when they encountered a bug (CS for an error), they identified what block was missing, explained that it was not where it belonged, and solved the problem, “It belongs after the ____ (in the code!).”

The students identified and explained in two contexts–the life cycle activity and coding. The coding reinforced the WIDA Key Language Use, explaining. Students learned the Language of Science and had an introduction on how to code!

Upon reflection, my one piece of advice would be to split this into two 30 minute lessons. I fit it all into one, and we would have loved more time to code! If you’re a primary ESL teacher, try this lesson out, and let me know how it goes!