ELD Support Classes

Spectrum of English Language Development Support Classes Offered at Egan

ELD I (Beginning Class)

Course description:

This course provides a comprehensive curriculum for new arrivals, with accelerated support in foundational literacy skills. Designed for students with limited English experience who, based on placement test results, instructors’ recommendations, and ELPAC scores (with an overall Initial ELPAC level of “novice English learner” or a Summative ELPAC score of 1, “beginning to develop). 

The goal of instruction is to prepare students to enter intermediate level courses. In this class, aspects of spoken English are emphasized, including stress and intonation, individual phonemes, and awareness of connected and reduced speech. Students are able to reduce their accent in English and reduce pronunciation problems of specific language groups. To achieve this goal, instruction focuses on developing students’ English competency by helping them to acquire skills in all basic skill areas, i.e., listening, speaking, reading, and writing. It emphasizes listening comprehension, speaking practice, extensive reading, and intensive general vocabulary development. 

ELD II (Intermediate Class)

Course description:

This course is for students with moderate English experience who, based on placement test results, instructors’ recommendations, and ELPAC scores (an Initial ELPAC level of “intermediate English learner level” or a Summative ELPAC score level 2 or 3, “somewhat developed” and “moderately developed”).

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This course focuses on developing core grammar principles for students. Some of the topics included are verb tenses, subject-verb agreement, word order, parts of speech, and modal auxiliaries. Students in this course learn to develop sentence-level writing and paragraph creation (culminating in short multi-paragraph writing). 

In this class, students will build vocabulary from the Academic Word List, word families, and context clues. They will further main mastery at identifying and understanding topics, main ideas, supporting details, transitions, and organizational patterns of academic and literary texts.

7th and 8th Grade Academic Support Class

Course description:

This course is designed for both English Language Learners and English-only learners who would benefit from academic language development as well as executive functioning skills training. Students are sorted according to their grade level.

Academic Support Class offers executive functioning strategies including: how to use a planner, create checklists for everyday tasks, setting time limits, establishing an effective routine for things such as homework. In addition, it focuses on developing students’ competency on core subjects: English, math, history, and science. Key core content standards across the four core areas are scaffolded to support students' access and acquisition of these targeted skills. By broadening and deepening students' foundational knowledge, students are able to successfully integrate into academic instruction and appropriate grade-level rigor. Cross curricular strategies are used to promote core course success. Topics include: reading fluency, systematic vocabulary development, reading comprehension, literary response and analysis, writing strategies and applications, writing conventions, organizational skills, and time management skills.

The goal for this course is to prepare students for grade-level integrated academic instruction and appropriate rigor.