Supporting Multilingual Learners: How Coteach Helps You Craft Content-Aligned Language Objectives

Your multilingual learners bring incredible assets to the classroom—intellectual flexibility, rich prior knowledge, and experience navigating multiple languages and cultural contexts. But teachers also face a unique challenge: helping them develop complex mathematical concepts while simultaneously building the academic English needed to access, discuss, and demonstrate their understanding of grade-level content.

Research shows the most effective approach embeds academic English development directly within content instruction. The challenge lies in creating coherent language and content learning experiences that truly support your students' growth. In what follows, we’ll share some tips for creating coherent language and content learning experiences, with a little help from Coteach along the way.

The Gold Standard: WIDA ELD Standards Framework

The WIDA ELD Standards Framework offers comprehensive resources for supporting English learners, including detailed guidance for building impactful content-focused language objectives. Developing language objectives aligned with both the WIDA framework and lesson-specific content is the gold standard and takes practice.

The framework centers on "Key Language Uses"—the most prominent ways language functions within a lesson. There are 4 Key Language Uses: Narrate, Argue, Inform, and Explain. In math, however, the Key Uses fall into two primary categories: Argue (persuade others of your mathematical reasoning) and Explain (communicate your mathematical thinking clearly). Occasionally, Inform appears in mathematical contexts, but argue and explain are much more common.

With its integration with IM® v.360 by Illustrative Mathematics®, Coteach helps you apply the WIDA framework directly to the curriculum, ensuring your language objectives remain tightly aligned with your lesson's mathematical learning goals. This creates the coherent learning experiences your multilingual students need while streamlining the process of developing meaningful, content-connected language objectives and supports.

Strategy: Co-Creating Language Objectives with Coteach

Here’s how you can partner with Coteach to develop targeted, grade-level aligned language objectives:

Step 1: Analyze the Lesson’s Core Activities

Before crafting language objectives, review your lesson activities and identify the predominant language use. Ask yourself: "Do students primarily need to explain their mathematical thinking, or are they arguing and justifying their reasoning to convince others?" Typically, one is most present, but it's possible for multiple Key Uses to appear. If equally present, there's no harm in creating a language objective for each Key Use.

Step 2: Create Content-Aligned Language Objectives

Once you’ve identified whether the lesson emphasizes the “explain” or “argue” language functions, you can use these targeted prompts with Coteach:

• "Please craft a language objective aligned with this lesson's learning goals. Root it in the WIDA Key Language Use, 'Explain'"

• "Create a language objective aligned to the lesson learning goals that focuses on the 'Argue' WIDA Key Language Use, helping students persuade others of their mathematical reasoning"

• "Generate both teacher and student-friendly versions of this language objective."

Step 3: Align the Language Objective to Lesson Activities

Once you have a language objective aligned to the lesson learning goal, you can ask Coteach to help apply it to core lesson activities. For example, if Coteach provided this language objective:

Students will explain ratio relationships using precise mathematical language ("for every," "the ratio of ___ to ___ is") while describing collections of objects using both spoken and written forms.

Based on this objective, you might prompt Coteach:

• "Provide sentence frames for each lesson activity that support this language objective"

• "What scaffolds aligned to this language objective will help my MLL students access the lesson activities?"

• "Recommend differentiated supports aligned to this language objective for my 1) Entering, 2) Emerging, and 3) Developing language learners."

Building Coherent Support Systems

The power of using Coteach to help create language objectives lies in the assurance that language development is tied directly to core curricular learning. When language objectives emerge from the same curriculum as content objectives, you avoid the sorts of disjointed learning experiences that creep in when the two operate in separate spheres—inconsistent strategies and supports that are disconnected from core learning.

Coherent language and lesson objective development recognizes that language and content learning aren't separate processes—they're interconnected aspects of the same learning experience, where language serves as a bridge to mathematical understanding and vice versa.

What’s Next

This post is the first in a three-part series exploring how Coteach can support your multilingual learners. In upcoming posts, we'll dive deeper into building scaffolds and differentiated supports, and explore advanced strategies for language-rich mathematical discourse.

For those wanting to dive deeper into the WIDA framework and master the full approach to crafting language objectives, we highly recommend checking out this three-part blog series from The All Access Classroom.

Ready to create language objectives that truly support your multilingual learners? Head to Coteach now!