US: Standards for Preschool ELLs: It's a Trend

[Francis Hult]

Education Week

 

Standards for Preschool ELLs: It's a Trend

 

California is poised to be the first state to adopt a set of standards, which state officials call "learning foundations," for English-language development devoted to preschool ELLs, according to officials of the California Department of Education. The California standards spell out what preschool ELLs should know at the "beginning," "middle," and "later" stages of learning English for the areas of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Find a link to them here.

 

In trying to figure out what kind of ground California is breaking, I found out that Maryland is set to adopt standards for English-language development that include the prekindergarten level. The proposed standards are grouped for grades prekindergarten-5 and 6-12. Check them out here.

 

Also, World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment, a consortium of 15 states housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has included prekindergarten in its 2007 edition of standards for English-language development. WIDA has created a separate set of English-language-development standards for prekindergarten and kindergarten together. Previously, it had K-2 grouped together, Tim Boals, the executive director of WIDA, told me in a telephone interview this week.

 

Full text:

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning-the-language/2007/11/who_is_first_in_creating_presc.html

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