What are the principles that guide the design of the ELD instruction?
Aug 08, 2025
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- EL Education is fiercely focused on equity for all children. All children deserve schools that foster their unique abilities, give them a real opportunity to achieve high academic standards, and prepare them well to take their full place in society when they leave school. The suite of ELD instruction in the EL Education Language Arts Curriculum 2025 edition helps multilingual learners realize these goals.
- Two key principles underlie the design of EL Education’s English Language Arts Curriculum:
- Multilingualism is an asset. Multilingual approaches honor the cultural and linguistic competence of multilingual learners while simultaneously removing barriers to learning about academic English language and cultural competence.
- Multilingual learners are adding an additional language to their repertoire of skills.
- Multilingual approaches to English Language Arts curriculum contribute to linguistic equity by honoring the cultural and linguistic competence of multilingual learners while simultaneously removing barriers to learning about dominant, academic English language and cultural competence.
- Research shows that multilingualism has multiple cognitive, social-emotional, academic, and career benefits, including enhanced logic and flexible and critical thinking, success in nurturing relationships, better self-control, and a leg up in the global job market.
- English-only, monolingual policies may hinder language development and contribute to a culture that devalues linguistic diversity.
- Multilingual learners deserve a rich, compelling, challenging curriculum. Our curriculum is culturally responsive and asset-based, creates opportunities and spaces for multilingual learners to set the course of their own learning, and helps students meet college- and career-ready standards as well as English Language Development Standards.
- Curriculum that is culturally responsive and asset-based builds on the cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of multilingual learners as conduits for building a community of belonging and for learning language and content more effectively.
- Culturally responsive and asset-based curriculum creates opportunities and spaces for multilingual learners to set the course of their own learning.
- Productive and equitable conversation spurs language development.
- Second language development reveals itself in various ways. Reading level is not necessarily language level.
- Culturally responsive and asset-based curriculum helps multilingual learners meet college- and career-ready academic standards, English Language Development Standards, and the EL Education Three Dimensions of Student Achievement.
- Culturally responsive and asset-based curriculum is aligned to English Learner Success Forum Developer Guidelines and criteria set by the Council of the Great City Schools.
