Talking About Language is an open-access resource developed by Professor Nigel Caplan at the University of Delaware to support K-12 teachers who are working with the 2020 WIDA English Language Development (ELD) Standards Framework.* One of the “big ideas” in the revised framework is the functional approach to language development, which draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). SFL is an educational linguistics – a way of describing and understanding the language choices that create meanings through words, clauses, and texts. While SFL is a welcome addition to the Framework, it is a complex theory with metalanguage (grammatical terminology) that is unfamiliar to many U.S. teachers. Talking About Language provides a glossary for the metalanguage used by the WIDA Framework with additional concepts from traditional (structural) grammar that teachers preparing for certification – and indeed all educators of multilingual learners – should find useful.

The word grammar makes many teachers and learners uncomfortable, even insecure: it conjures images of pages covered with red ink and experts criticizing your “bad” grammar. So in SFL, we often refer instead to knowledge about language: knowledge about language forms and resources, about the meanings we create, about the choices available to speakers and writers, and about the impacts that those choices have on listeners and readers. However, in order to build that knowledge, we need a way of talking about language: that’s what SFL promises and this web resource attempts to provide.

* Talking About Language is neither affiliated with nor endorsed by WIDA.

This open-access resource was created entirely by humans without any use of “generative AI” products. H5P activities in parts 1 and 2 were created by Edna Yegani. The text was written by Nigel A. Caplan and is released under a Creative Commons attribution / non-commercial license. The development of Talking About Language was made possible by two generous grants from the University of Delaware Library.