Subtest III - Foundations of ELD and SDAIE
Subtest III: Foundations of English Language Development and SDAIE tests culture, equity, family/community engagement, and sheltered content instruction across the curriculum. Items ask you to recognize asset-based practices and to design SDAIE instruction that keeps grade-level content rigorous while making it accessible.
Culture and equity
Culture is learned, shared, dynamic, and variable within groups; avoid static or stereotyped descriptions. Surface culture includes food and holidays; deep culture includes communication styles, values, and expectations about schooling. Funds of knowledge are the skills and knowledge families and communities possess. Culturally responsive teaching uses those assets, holds high expectations, and examines bias. Equity means access to grade-level content and appropriate support, not lowering standards. A deficit view blames students and families; an asset view asks what resources and experiences they bring.
Family and community engagement
Distinguish involvement (attending events) from engagement (shared decision-making and reciprocal communication). Epstein's six types include parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision making, and collaborating with the community. Effective schools communicate in families' preferred languages, welcome input, and connect learning to community contexts.
SDAIE
SDAIE is sheltered content instruction in English, not ELD. It uses comprehensible input (visuals, gestures, realia, modeling), schema building, hands-on tasks, cooperative grouping, language objectives, graphic organizers, metacognitive strategies, and frequent checks for understanding. SDAIE plans should identify both content and language demands and provide scaffolds without diluting the standard.
Worked example
A seventh-grade science lesson on photosynthesis includes ELs at the Expanding level. The content objective is to explain how plants convert light energy into chemical energy. The language objective is to describe the process using sequence words and a labeled diagram. The teacher previews key terms with images, models a think-aloud with a diagram, provides a cloze paragraph with a word bank, and has pairs label and explain the process. The exit ticket asks students to write two sentences using 'first' and 'then.' Reasoning: the grade-level content remains intact; the diagram, model, and word bank are SDAIE scaffolds; the language objective makes the linguistic demand explicit; the exit ticket assesses both content and language.
Traps
Do not treat culture as static or use cultural stereotypes. Do not equate parent involvement with engagement. Do not water down content. Do not confuse SDAIE with ELD. Do not ignore the home language as a resource. Do not rely on lecture alone.