Evolving ELP Standards and Constructs in Relation to Academic Content Standards

In the NCLB era, many states rushed to develop or adopt ELP standards and assessments with little guidance on defining the ELP construct (Boals et al., 2015; Wolf et al., 2014). At the time that NCLB-era ELP standards and assessments were developed, the construct of academic English language, or the language of school, was largely unexplored (DiCerbo, Anstrom, Baker, & Rivera, 2014). As a result, the ELP construct was represented in varied ways; for example, predecessor ELP standards and assessments might conceptualize academic and social language, or discrete and integrated language skills differently (Bailey & Huang, 2011; Wolf et al., 2014). Some review studies have pointed out that states differed in their approaches to developing ELP standards and operationalizing those standards as ELP assessment constructs and test items (Bailey & Huang, 2011; Frantz, Bailey, Starr, & Perea, 2014; National Research Council, 2011; Wolf & Faulkner-Bond, 2016).

The CCSS for ELA explicitly specify the language and literacy skills in grades 6 to 12 expected for the academic content areas, including history/social studies and science and technical subjects, as part of the ELA standards. That is, these content standards have attempted to establish common language and literacy skills across the different academic content areas. This situation offers language test developers the benefits of target expectations from which to create measures of ELP needed to acquire content (and demonstrate learning) expressed in the academic standards. Indeed, the ELPD Framework (CCSSO, 2012) offers precisely this kind of approach to defining the construct of ELP. The ELPD Framework was created in part to provide guidance to states working to develop or adapt ELP standards for alignment with the CCSS. The ELPD Framework describes the language competencies that students need to achieve in the CCSS and provides a taxonomy to identify language tasks and language skills in CCR standards. For example, the framework suggests that key language tasks and specific language skills (in productive and receptive functions) be organized under each practice identified from the content standards (e.g., making sense of problems, communicating mathematical reasoning, constructing arguments as key practices in CCSS for Mathematics).

Additionally, since the introduction of the CCSS and NGSS, a number of initiatives have attempted to characterize inherent language demands in the content areas in more detail (e.g., Lee et al., 2013). Bunch, Kibler, and Pimentel (2012), for instance, discuss major language and literacy demands in the CCSS ELA including (1) engaging complex texts (reading standards), (2) using evidence in writing and research (writing standards), (3) working collaboratively and presenting ideas (speaking and listening standards), and (4) developing linguistic resources to do the above-mentioned tasks effectively (language standards). The authors also highlight the strong interdisciplinary focus of the language and literacy requirements in the CCSS.

A complementary line of research has also contributed to our understanding of the language skills in the disciplines. For example, LaRusso et al. (2016) conducted a large-scale, longitudinal study on the effects of academic language on student reading abilities. They found that academic language abilities in the fall of the school year significantly and positively predicted Grade 5 through 7 students’ deep reading comprehension in the following spring. Specifically, academic language abilities to connect ideas, track themes, organize texts, and understand metalinguistic skills among others were related to students’ abilities to apply what they had read to different contexts and perspectives. Given that this manner of reading underpins learning in other text-dependent disciplines such as science and social studies, it is reasonable to expect that the positive connection holds between student academic language abilities and these disciplines as well. A recent review by Truckenmiller, Park, Daboa, and Wu Newton (2019) also reports on the positive impact of academic language instruction on student performance in ELA, science, and social studies in Grades 4 to 8.

As the literature on academic English proficiency and its interconnection with academic content areas has evolved, the two major ELP consortia (i.e., the WIDA consortium and the English Language Proficiency Assessment for the 21st Century [ELPA21] consortium) have also developed new ELP standards including language skills and knowledge tied to CCR standards. Notably, the two consortia have taken different approaches to revising or developing their respective ELP standards. In revising its 2004 standards in 2007 and 2012, WIDA maintained its original structure of four language domains (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) and added descriptions of how each standard is connected to CCSS ELA and mathematics standards (WIDA, 2004, 2007, 2012). Moreover, the new WIDA ELD Instructional Framework (WIDA, 2018) makes more explicit both the academic contexts of English language learning by “increasing emphasis on interaction and meaning-making within common classroom learning experiences for each subject area” (p. 1) and the integration of the four modalities (listening, speaking, reading, writing) into common language uses in the classroom, namely, arguing, discussing, explaining, and recounting.

In contrast, ELPA21’s ELP standards take the Common Core standards as their basis and reflect the prevailing view of integrated language skills in academic contexts (CCSSO, 2013). Thus, ELPA21’s ELP standards are not divided into the traditional four language domains of listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Rather, the standards include descriptions of integrated language skills (i.e., oral proficiency that integrates listening and speaking, literacy skills that incorporate reading and writing, receptive skills that focus on listening and reading comprehension, productive skills that focus on oral and written expression), a conception that appears to focus on authentic interactions and more complex uses of language in order to correspond to the deeper content learning and the more rigorous language demands embodied in CCR standards (Mislevy & Duran, 2014; Wolf, Guzman-Orth, & Hauck, 2016).

Next, we examine example CCR and ELP standards for language demands explicitly mentioned in them, as well as for the implied language knowledge students will need to possess in order to meet the standards. These examples shed light on a way to define the ELP construct, connecting content and ELP standards.