Implementing the WIDA ELD Standards Framework takes time and looks different across different contexts. While some educators are working with different grade-level content curricula, English language specialists may be working with language curricula focusing on a range of proficiency levels. When instructing multilingual learners, it is especially important that curricula strike a balance between content and language. Although it is tempting to start at the lesson level to begin implementation since it feels more manageable to start small, starting at the curricular level is more effective at building a yearlong, cohesive learning experience that builds on current knowledge and experiences and more intentionally towards new understandings and skills. This Focus Bulletin supports educators to take a genre-based approach to making decisions throughout all units of curricula that can both begin and deepen the alignment of the current academic curricula being used to the WIDA ELD Standards Framework.
Resource Details View Download NowReleased May 2025
Interaction is of great importance in classrooms, where bi/multilingual students exchange ideas and contribute to a community of learners as they continue to expand their linguistic repertoire. That is why interaction is one of the six Big Ideas of the Marco DALE. In this Focus Bulletin, we explore interaction and its connection to multiliteracies and the Marco DALE modes of communication and Language Expectations.
Published 2024
Authors: Analleli Hernández, Margo Gottlieb
Released March 2024
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
Released December 2022
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
Released June 2022
This Focus Bulletin offers strategies for advancing full and meaningful access in bilingual settings during the mundo actual of COVID-19. The bulletin emphasizes the importance of valuing multilingual learners’ linguistic and cultural wealth, using translanguaging, and leveraging technological resources.
Published August 2020
Authors: Sam Aguirre, Erika Rosales
Released August 2020
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
Released November 2013