California English Language Development (ELD)

Standards
The Basics
The California English Language Development (ELD) Standards are a set of
standards for EL students from kindergarten through grade twelve.
These standards are meant to complement the California Common Core State
Standards for English Language Arts (ELA)/Literacy and are not meant to
replace the CCSS.
The ELD standards are meant to help students with their English language
development while students are simultaneously encountering and learning
high-level academic content.
At each grade level, the ELD standards list and define knowledge, skills, and
abilities that EL students need in order to be successful in the academic content
of their grade level.
The standards are intended to represent higher-level ELA content with college-
and career-readiness as one of the goals making the standards challenging.
There is also a wealth of information included in the actual CA ELD Standards
document about how the standards were written, detailed examples, and the
rationale behind the standards.
Purpose and Intended Users According to the Actual
Document
The CA ELD Standards are designed to:
Reflect expectations of what ELs should know and be able to do with the
English language in various contexts
Set clear developmental benchmarks that reflect ELs English language
proficiency at various developmental stages in a variety of cognitive and
linguistic tasks
Provide teachers with a foundation for delivering rich instruction for ELs so
that they can help their students develop English proficiency and prepare
ELs to meet grade-level academic achievement standards
Provide parents, guardians, families, and other caretakers with a tool for
discussing learning progress so that they can continue to support their
childrens language and cognitive development at home
Provide curriculum developers with guidance on creating rigorous,
linguistically and academically rich curriculum and instructional materials
for ELs
 Provide a framework to guide development of ELD assessment systems
that help California educators ensure that all ELs make progress in the
English language knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to become
college- and career-ready
Organization
The ELD Standards are organized as follows:
Section I: Overview
Goal
Critical Principles for Developing Language and Cognition in
Academic Contexts (taken from the Grade 8 ELD Standards)
Part I: Interacting in Meaningful Ways
A. Collaborative
1. Exchanging information and ideas with
others through oral collaborative discussions
on a range of social and academic topics
2. Interacting with others in written English in
various communicative forms (print,
communicative technology and multimedia)
3. Offering and justifying opinions, negotiating
with and persuading others in communicative
exchanges
4. Adapting language choices to various
contexts (based on task, purpose, audience,
and text type)
B. Interpretive
5. Listening actively to spoken English in a
range of social and academic contexts
6. Reading closely literary and informational
texts and viewing multimedia to determine how
meaning is conveyed explicitly and implicitly
through language
7. Evaluating how well writers and speakers
use language to support ideas and arguments
with details or evidence depending on
modality, text type, purpose, audience, topic,
and content area
8. Analyzing how writers and speakers use
vocabulary and other language resources for
specific purposes (to explain, persuade,
 entertain, etc.) depending on modality, text
type, purpose, audience, topic, and content
area
C. Productive
9. Expressing information and ideas in formal
oral presentations on academic topics
10. Writing literary and informational texts to
present, describe, and explain ideas and
information, using appropriate technology
11. Justifying own arguments and evaluating
others arguments in writing
12. Selecting and applying varied and precise
vocabulary and other language resources to
effectively convey ideas
Part II: Learning About How English Works
A. Structuring Cohesive Texts
1. Understanding text structure
2. Understanding cohesion
B. Expanding and Enriching Ideas
3. Using verbs and verb phrases
4. Using nouns and noun phrases
5. Modifying to add details
C. Connecting and Condensing Ideas
6. Connecting ideas
7. Condensing ideas
Part III: Using Foundational Literacy Skills
Section II: Elaboration on Critical Principles for Developing Language and
Cognition in Academic Contexts
There is a section listed Texts and Discourse in Context that lists
the CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy, the purposes for language,
informational text types to include, literary text types to include, and
audiences to include.
All of the skills listed from Part I and II are listed again and
elaborated upon with sample criteria given for each skill.
Variations of Standards Between and at Grade Levels
At each grade level, the standards are structured almost exactly the same. There
are only small differences based more on age and cognitive development than
anything else.
 One difference is that under Part I and II, each subheading has the
corresponding CA CCSS for ELA/Literacy for that particular grade level.
Additionally, some of the younger grades do not have certain standards
that the older grades have or have slight variations of the same standards.
Overall, though, the similarities are obvious and make it so teachers can
easily see the progression of skills across the grade levels.
Kindergarten: Offering Opinions. Offer opinions and ideas in
conversations using a small set of learned phrases (e.g., I think X),
as well as open responses.
Grade 8: Supporting opinions and persuading others.
Negotiate with or persuade others in conversations (e.g., to gain
and hold the floor or to ask for clarification) using learned phrases
(e.g. I think...Would you please repeat that?) and open responses.
Grades 11-12: Supporting opinions and persuading others.
Negotiate with or persuade others in conversations (e.g., ask for
clarification or repetition) using learned phrases (e.g., Could you
repeat that please? I believe) and open responses to express
and defend opinions.
These skills are in three categories for emerging, expanding, and bridging
EL learners.
Each skill is expanded upon as the students language skills
improve
An emerging student will engage in short written
exchanges
An expanding student will engage in longer written
exchanges
A bridging student will engage in extended written
exchanges