...
All schools are required to gather and report data measuring the language proficiency of individual multilingual learners using the WIDA assessment. While you do not need to be familiar with the WIDA assessment, you are expected to use this data to inform the academic language you select and present to students to help them succeed in meeting the lesson or unit objectives and goals.
One you have gathered the data about a students WIDA score, perhaps by asking your cooperating teacher, you can use the Can Do Descriptors to decide what your student "can do" without support and where additional language supports may be needed. The WIDA "Can Do" grade level descriptors for all 6 proficiency levels are linked in 6.5b Academic Language Objective: WIDA Resources - Teaching Multilingual Learners within your SOE Lesson Plan Handbook. For more information about the philosophy guiding the creation of the Can Do Descriptors for supporting language learners, you can view this 2 minute video produced by WIDA or view this PDF:
| View file | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Example: Using the Can Do Descriptors to Inform your Instructional Planning
Fictional multilingual student "Tua" in the profile available above, he is rated at the following WIDA proficiency levels:
Overall Proficiency: 4.7 "Expanding" (out of 6.0)
Listening Level: 2.4 "Beginning"
Speaking Level: 2.6 "Developing"
Reading Level: 6.0 "Bridging"
Writing Level: 4.5 "Expanding"
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.
Since you may have a variety of WIDA proficiency scores represented in your class, you may need to examine the academic language and supports needed at more than one level (1-6). You may also decide that no further supports are needed for your multilingual learners to achieve their instructional goals, in which case-- you may want to consider extending your lesson's instructional objective(s), language modality (SWRL), or the complexity of the academic language used to challenge and support your learners for whom the lesson content may be too easy.
...