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Example 1: Using the Can Do Descriptors to Inform your Instructional Planning

There are many steps in the process towards selecting academic language accommodations and supports for specific proficiency levels. As you explore ways to accommodate and support your language learners, the best place to start is to have a conversation with your cooperating teacher or colleagues. Because there are many steps and context is key to responsive differentiation for students needing academic language supports, here is an example created for you to help walk you through the process, which becomes easier with practice and familiarity with your individual students, subject specific content and standards, and grade-level or context. 

We will use fictional 11th grade multilingual student "Tuaha", located with additional information in the profile available above, for this example.

Step One: Identify Individual Student Proficiency Levels

So, first as Tuaha's teacher can check his portfolio within her class's data set and finds that Tuaha is currently rated at the following WIDA levels: 

In this example, we can see that the same student may have greater proficiency in some modality areas more than others. The outcome of this is that the type of language support offered must reflect the academic language required as well as the SWRL (Speaking, Writing, Reading or Listening) primarily used to demonstrate or understand the lesson's learning objective. 

Step Two: Consider your context and specific lesson objectives

More details about how to do this are available for you within this handbook in sections 

Our context: Let's say our example lesson objective relates an 11th grade Earth Science class and the following MN Science Standard and benchmark. I've pasted it here so that you can see it in it's original langaugelanguage:

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The objective, then, for this lesson with "Tuaha"

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could be something like: "Students will be able to (SWBAT) gather and synthesize information related to the how

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climate change impacts one MN American Indian Tribe through the oral presentation of a guest speaker representing the local tribal indigenous community". For Tuaha and his classmates, I would present the objective as an "I Can" statement using student-friendly language as follows: "I can synthesize the phenomena related to climate change presented by our guest speaker from our (local) tribal community". I would use this opportunity to familiarize my 11th graders with the term "phenomena", one of the academic language forms they should be able to use when talking about their gathered data. 

As the teacher, I would further identify that the primary language modality needed for this objective and activity, which in this case is "Listening". The academic language needed for success for the primary language function "synthesize" might be as follows: 1) Form(s): Sustainability, phenomena, impact, 2) Syntax: "I have seen..." and "Over time, the Earth..."  3) Discourse: Extended Narration of Life Experiences

Based on my lesson's objectives and my example student, Tuaha, I am going to select discourse as academic language my focus. Tuaha has higher scores in the areas of Reading and Writing, but he could easily get lost in the extended narrative provided by the guest speaker as I see when I check what Tuaha "Can Do" in that are using the level 2 descriptor below:

I see that Tuaha can sort the guest speakers oral language statements according to time frames. This is great! However, my guest speaker will not be speaking in statements spaced by large amounts of "wait time", or a slower rate of speech than is normally used for story-telling and extended narration which can best be understood in a paragraph-like format. I then realize that Tuaha may need an accommodation or support to help him keep pace with this oral presentation by our guest speaker. I consult tools like the matrices and charts below and consider what may help Tuaha navigate this discourse level academic language need.

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