Part 5: Academic Language Expectations

Guiding Questions and Prompts:

In this part, you will analyze the most important texts and tasks for language expectations using the WIDA Language Features. Start with the activities related to your summative assessment. The language objectives/targets will be based on the language expectations. You will need to determine the summative assessment and some of the major activities first, in order to analyze them. Make sure that both oral and written language activities are included.

Use the Language Expectations table and guidance linked here and the guiding questions to analyze texts or tasks for academic language.

-What language functions will be used in the major activities of this unit? In other words, what is the purpose of language to be used? The key language uses can provide some guidance for this.

-What features of discourse are used including genre, organization and cohesion, and linguistic density of text? (See WIDA proficiency level descriptors for ideas on these features and the chart below.)

-What sentence dimension language forms (patterns and grammatical structures) will students be using in this lesson? i.e. parts of speech, verb tenses, subject-verb agreement, use of pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, sentence structure (syntax), complex and compound sentences, questions, word order.

-What keywords and phrases will students need to understand and use to participate in this activity? Consider everyday, cross-disciplinary, and technical language (similar to Tier 1, 2, 3 words)