Concluding Remarks

We conclude by proposing four guiding principles for the operationalization of the ELP construct so that future ELP assessment might be more effective.

• • Guiding principle 1: The ELP construct should be articulated with a view to language as a social practice and action to enhance meaningful language learning for students (van Lier & Walqui, 2012).
• • Guiding principle 2: The ELP construct should be elaborated in ways that can help teachers and students to understand general and specific language demands associated with various school tasks across content areas.
• • Guiding principle 3: Content and language should be acknowledged as largely intertwined to help understand the link between ELP and content standards.
• • Guiding principle 4: Explicit articulation of different levels of proficiency in ELP should play an important role in establishing developmental progressions to guide teaching and student learning.

By investigating the language demands embedded in academic content standards and ELP standards, their linked assessments, and curricular materials, future studies can characterize the construct of ELP—that is, the essential language knowledge and skills that EL students may need to acquire to meaningfully participate and succeed in academic learning and assessment. We anticipate that the findings of such studies can help improve the education of EL students.

Acknowledgments

The work presented here was supported in part by the William T. Grant Foundation grant ID 187863 (An Investigation of the Language Demands in Standards, Assessments, and Curricular Materials for English Learners) to Educational Testing Service and UCLA. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Foundation.

Note

1 In this chapter, we use English language proficiency (ELP) standards to refer to both ELP standards and English language development (ELD) standards. Both terms are in use by the different states, with California and the WIDA consortium retaining ELD standards to refer to their most recent revisions of English language standards (2012 and 2015, respectively), whereas the ELPA21 Consortium, for example, refers to the standards as ELP standards.

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