WIDA ELD Standards, Curriculum and Instruction

MCSD CLD Curriculum is designed to immerse our EL learners in academic language; communication and collaboration within grade-level content knowledge and skills.  Our curriculum encourages our EL learners to use all features of language (vocabulary, sentence structure, linguistic complexity) to acquire a new and deeper understanding of the language of the content areas and to communicate that understanding to others.  For this purpose, we use the WIDA ELD Standards as our curriculum framework.  The WIDA ELD Standards Framework combines the Colorado Academic Standards (CAS) with the WIDA ELD Standards in a system that embeds English language development within the content area study. Using a systematic template, our CLD Teachers conduct linguistic analyses of the content curriculum and identify potential challenges for EL learners.  Instruction for EL learners is then focused on content vocabulary, language functions, and the grammatical and lexical features of the written and oral language within content areas.