Research Publications

This WIDA Focus Bulletin explores the integral connection between language and culture for American Indian English Language Learners.

Published May 2014 
Authors: Rosalie Grant, Paula White, Julia Cortada, Sookweon Min

This WIDA Focus Bulletin emphasizes the many benefits of collaboration. The collaborative approach is presented as a cyclical process with shared responsibility by educators assessing, reflecting upon, planning for and teaching multilingual learners.

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This Focus Bulletin offers strategies for advancing equity in bilingual settings during the mundo actual of COVID-19. The bulletin emphasizes the importance of valuing multilingual learners’ linguistic and cultural diversity, using translanguaging, and leveraging technological resources.

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Published August 2020
Authors: Sam Aguirre, Erika Rosales

In this Focus Bulletin, WIDA revisits landmark legislation and policies that shaped language education in the U.S. It presents unintended consequences on programming and instruction of bi/multilingual students; showcases how field practitioners address language policy and its consequences; and includes tools for reflection, collaboration, professional learning and community engagement.

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Published November 2022
Author: Mariana Castro

This Focus Bulletin reframes the WIDA Can Do Philosophy as a can do cycle of actions that can be embedded into teaching and learning experiences throughout the entire school year. In it, we offer resource banks of questions that can be used to elicit student assets and reflect on ways to build on student assets at the beginning of each unit, during each unit, and at the end of each unit.

Published April 2022
Authors: Maya Martinez-Hart, Christina Nelson

The purpose of this WIDA Focus Bulletin is to provide guidance to teachers of English language arts (ELA) who are implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and working to respond to the specific needs of ELLs. In their treatment of academic language (or the language of school), the CCSS represent a departure from existing content standards.

Published November 2013
Authors: Daniella Molle, Mariana Castro, Julia Cortada, Leslie Grimm

This Focus Bulletin offers expert advice, data on 2020-21 identification rates, data templates, common scenarios and resources for school teams identifying K-12 multilingual learners for Specific Learning Disabilities.

Originally published May 2017/Updated November 2023
Author: Lynn Shafer Willner

​​This Focus Bulletin explores how interactive learning can benefit multilingual learners. Expressing and co-constructing ideas are discussed as two aspects of interactive learning that are important for the learning and wellbeing of multilingual youth.

Published December 2021 
Authors: Jennifer Wilfrid, Daniella Molle

In February, 2011, WIDA published a Focus Bulletin on Language and Culture, which was enormously popular, and which continues to be requested by readers. This Focus Bulletin has been reformatted and lightly edited to emphasize current WIDA resources and terminology.

This Focus Bulletin explores linguistic and cultural diversity in school, and how teachers, staff and parents can help multilingual learners feel welcome, confident, and prepared to succeed academically. 

Published September 2019 
Authors: Don Bouchard, Mariana Castro, Andrea Cammilleri

This WIDA Focus Bulletin introduces readers to the four pillars of Language-Focused Family Engagement and provides tools to help educators examine their local family engagement practices.​

Published September 2018
Author: Delis Cuéllar, Alissa Blair, Lorena Mancilla

This Focus Bulletin emphasizes how multilingual learners' everyday language can be an asset to science teachers in their efforts to promote classroom engagement. It provides educators with real-world examples and guiding questions to help create learning spaces where sensemaking, co-construction, language development and equity can flourish simultaneously.

Published June 2022
Authors: Rita MacDonald, David Crowther, Jennifer Wilfrid

This Focus Bulletin investigates how educators of bi/multilingual learners can leverage multiliteracies for instruction. Drawing from a fictional scenario in a language arts classroom, this bulletin shows how multiliteracies can be leveraged throughout the teaching and learning cycle. The Focus Bulletin includes various perspectives from experts in the field to illustrate the role of multiliteracies, as well as tools for reflection and implementation in the bilingual classroom.

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This Focus Bulletin explores the kind of spoken English language that multilingual learners benefit from developing, showing how that oral language is described in WIDA standards resources and assessed on the ACCESS for ELLs Speaking test.

Published October 2019 
Authors: Mark Chapman, Dale Erlandson

This Focus Bulletin invites early care and education (ECE) educators to promote equity for young multilingual children and their families. In the bulletin, we offer ideas for taking a language-focused approach to equitable caregiving and instructional practice in ECE settings. Also, we highlight voices from the field, and offer reflection questions to help you consider what it means to promote equity for multilingual children and their families.

Published February 2021 
Authors: Amanda Spalter, Lorena Mancilla

This WIDA Focus Bulletin outlines ways in which educators can provide English Language Learners with disabilities access to complex language via classroom activities and engagement opportunities.

Published March 2017 
Authors: Lynn Shafer Willner, Cynthia Lundgren, Mira Monroe, Julia Cortada

This WIDA Focus Bulletin provides examples of specific macro-scaffolding and micro-scaffolding practices in action in a math classroom and includes guidance for developing these scaffolding practices over time.​

Published June 2018
Authors: Jen Daniels, Ruslana Westerlund

This WIDA Focus Bulletin explores ways to strengthen reasoning and language in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education.

Published January 2017 
Author: Rita MacDonald

This WIDA Focus Bulletin focuses on the needs of students who have limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE). Because the vast majority of students in this group are enrolled in grades 6 through 12, we will focus on those grade levels. However, many of the tips and suggestions can be applied in lower grade levels as well. Throughout the bulletin we will explore academic and social-emotional factors that may affect this group of students, examine the benefits of building community partnerships, address how to assess student readiness levels, and offer a checklist of considerations for instructional planning.

Published May 2015
Authors: Lauren Keppler, Lucia Morales, Julia Cortada, Maria Austin

​This Focus Bulletin illustrates how teachers and students can use language development portfolios to interpret and document language growth. The bulletin follows the story of how a grade-level team introduced portfolios to their practice, posing several questions the team asked as they refined their usage. It closes by offering two sample tools that teachers can use and adapt to capture multilingual learners’ language growth using modified Proficiency Level Descriptors (PLDs) from the WIDA English Language Development Framework, 2020 Edition.

Published: December 2022 
Authors: Fernanda Marinho Kray, Margo Gottlieb, Lynn Shafer Willner

This Focus Bulletin illustrates how educators in featured International Baccalaureate schools are integrating WIDA resources as they design lessons for multilingual learners.

Published June 2019 
Authors: Jon Nordmeyer, Ruslana Westerlund, Elizabeth Cranley, Anne Katz