Common Core and ELLs: Key Shifts in Language Arts and Literacy

Shift 1: Balancing Informational & Literary Texts (K-5)

Students read a true balance of informational and literary texts. Elementary school classrooms are, therefore, places where students access the world — science, social studies, the arts and literature — through text. At least 50% of what students read is informational.

Shift 2: Knowledge in the Disciplines (Grades 6-12)

Content area teachers outside of the ELA classroom emphasize literacy experiences in their planning and instruction. Students learn through domain specific texts in science and social studies classrooms — rather than referring to the text, they are expected to learn from what they read.

Shift 3: Staircase of Complexity

In order to prepare students for the complexity of college and career ready texts, each grade level requires a “step” of growth on the “staircase”. Students read the central, grade appropriate text around which instruction is centered. Teachers are patient, create more time and space in the curriculum for this close and careful reading, and provide appropriate and necessary scaffolding and supports so that it is possible for students reading below grade level.

Shift 4: Text-based Answers

Students have rich and rigorous conversations which are dependent on a common text. Teachers insist that classroom experiences stay deeply connected to the text on the page and that students develop habits for making evidentiary arguments both in conversation, as well as in writing to assess comprehension of a text.

Shift 5: Writing from Sources

Writing needs to emphasize use of evidence to inform or make an argument rather than the personal narrative and other forms of decontextualized prompts. While the narrative still has an important role, students develop skills through written arguments that respond to the ideas, events, facts, and arguments presented in the texts they read.

Shift 6: Academic Vocabulary

Students constantly build the vocabulary they need to access grade level complex texts. By focusing strategically on comprehension of pivotal and commonly found words (such as “discourse,” “generation,” “theory,” and “principled”) and less on esoteric literary terms (such as “onomatopoeia” or “homonym”), teachers constantly build students’ ability to access more complex texts across the content areas.

What does this mean for English language learners?

The shifts have important implications for ELLs. Most importantly, ELLs need to be involved in the learning and taking part in a way that allows them to experience hands-on, student-centered learning. By having ELLs simply watch the other students interact, they are relegated to a position that will not maximize their time spent in the classroom.

That works hand-in-hand with the second expectation for planning classroom instruction, which is that ELLs need to be fully engaged in the learning process. Students learn best by doing. Working in cooperative groups or peer tutoring are two ways that involve students in the learning process.

It’s also critical to remember, however, that while learning in collaborative groups is beneficial, an opportunity to be accountable for one’s own learning is also needed for ELLs. In order to challenge students, teachers need to carefully craft a supportive environment and design ways that allow students to take risks, grapple with real-life situations, and problem solve as they will be expected to do whether at college or on the job. (For more on helping ELLs become more independent learners, see our video interview with Dr. Diane August.)

In addition, the Standards establish a shared responsibility for literacy development across the disciplines, not just for the ELA teacher. Teachers of ELA, history/social studies, science, and technical subjects are expected to “use their content area expertise to help students meet the particular challenges of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and language in their respective fields.” This means that content and literacy are taught simultaneously, providing ELLs with the opportunity to strengthen their literacy skills as they acquire content knowledge.

Finally, these shifts remind us that students have learned at a young age that most questions asked in school have only one correct answer. And the keeper of that answer has been the teacher. We know that students have greater retention of information when they have the opportunity to discover the answer themselves versus simply being told the answer. The process leading to the answer enhances the comprehension of concepts, which is why doing an experiment is far more powerful that watching someone else do it.

It is clear that helping ELLs (and their English-speaking peers) adjust to these shifts will provide new challenges for educators and for the students themselves. Teachers, paraprofessional aides, and administrators will have to be creative in finding the most effective way to deliver engaging instruction and professional development. By better understanding what the shifts mean and how the mastery of this new approach will benefit our students, however, we can take the first important steps to helping our students succeed with the Common Core State Standards.