WIDA

__ WIDA Standards (English) __

The World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment standards for English are basically a guideline for teachers, from Pre-k to grade 12, to plan instruction for students who are not native English speakers. The WIDA consortium strives to link the development of English language skills with academics in all the content areas. WIDA was also developed to connect assessment of English Language Learners (ELLs), in the form of WIDA’s ACCESS for ELLs test, to the content they are learning in the classroom. As teachers are planning their lessons, they can refer to content standards for the academic content and the WIDA standards for the language content for their ELL students. WIDA standards are divided into five areas, Social and Instructional communication, Language Arts content language, Math content language, Science content language, and Social Studies content language. In addition these five areas are repeated for Formative and Summative Frameworks. The Formative Framework describes the processes of student learning. The Summative Framework describes the outcomes of student learning. The standards are grouped into grade level clusters (Pre-K-K, 1-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12) and language domains (listening, speaking, reading, writing). Model Performance Indicators (MPIs) in each cluster and domain are divided into levels (Entering, Beginning, Developing, Expanding, Bridging, and Reaching) so that teachers can individualize what level students are at for each. Performance Definitions at each level describe what the student must demonstrate in terms of linguistic complexity (amount and quality of speech or writing), vocabulary usage (words or phrases used for a given situation), and language control (ability to be understood and types of errors made) in order to be placed at that level. Below you will find a link to the WIDA consortium’s web page as well as a pdf file of the Resource Guide to the WIDA standards. [| WIDA]