Open Source ESL/EFL Curriculum for Young Learners

IQ Curriculum Updates & Goals

With my daughter being sick, there hasn’t been a lot of time to sit down and focus on the IQ Curriculum, but I’ve been doing a bit of work on the back-end structure of it. By the end of this week the overall framework should in place, and I’ll shift into building content.

The IQ Curriculum leveling system consists of three age ranges- kindergarten, lower elementary and upper elementary- and six developmental stages- entering, beginning, developing, expanding, bridging and reaching- within each of those ranges.  Stage Six, “reaching,” is equivalent performance to a native speaker of the same age, which is the goal for any area of knowledge or language skill.

Resources will divided into three categories: content, skills and instructional. The distinctions between these different categories reflect more a choice of focus than any absolute separation between them. After all,  ”immersion” is about the interconnection between things.

The objective is to offer resources for educators of young learners- teachers, tutors, parents, carers, volunteers, etc.- and the young learners themselves to enable a broad foundation of academic and communicative English. The entire focus of the IQ Curriculum is on offering a range of options for achieving this goal. It is deliberately modular so that the resources can be put together in different combinations and sequences to meet local needs.

There are no magic wands for language acquisition, no shortcuts and no surefire methods that will guarantee success. What we can all do is consistently apply fundamental principles, and to try find what works for a given child within his or her particular context. In the best of circumstances, mastery of English is a multi-year process towards a moving target. Without genuine support, effective resources and a coherent framework to put the effort all together, the learning of English to any degree of competency becomes a functionally impossible task.

Maybe education is and should be a societal mandate/responsibility.  However, it starts to get into real shades of gray to look at how well countries around the world are doing at providing effective English educational opportunities for all their children. My vision for the IQ Curriculum is that anyone anywhere who wants to help children learn English in a comprehensive way have resources freely available at their fingertips to do so along with the tools and support needed for successful implementation.

IQ Curriculum Skills Standards

Here are the skills standards for the IQ Curriculum. Whereas “content” is what a young learner should know to be considered proficient in English, “skills” articulate what they should be able to do at at a given level. Combined together, the two standards provide a solidly comprehensive framework for placing the progress of young learners within a measurable context.

The next step is to articulate the developmental standards of formative and summative assessment . Both the content and skills standards will be placed into a framework to define the developmental steps from “entering” (beginner) to “reaching” (at level) relative to the standards.

If anyone wonders why this is important to do, consider a few of the very common questions parents ask: “How is my child doing in his/her English class?” “Is my child’s progress too slow?” “What does my child need to learn to become a good English speaker?”

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to answer these questions with precision?

IQ Curriculum Content Standards

I’ve decided for the first pass to focus on American grade-equivalent K-5. The following topics will form the basic structure of how content is organized on the IQ Curriculum website. The content topics and how they’re organized are taken from the WIDA English Language Proficiency Standards, but they will be edited to be more appropriate for a global audience.  I do believe, however, that taken as a whole the topics do reflect a the necessary comprehensive foundation of academic and social English.

The posts to follow will outline the IQ Curriculum Skills Standards, the Formative & Summative Developmental Frameworks, and the Universal Design for Learning Lesson Planning Checklist.