Making Language Visible

The WIDA 2020 ELD Standards are powerful—and can feel overwhelming. As a co-author, I know: it took us more than three years to write it with an incredible team of consultants and experts!

So, over the years, I’ve been tinkering with the Language Functions and Features (LFFs) and was mapping them onto the SFL metafunctions. I presented my first analysis at the International SFL Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2025 (Westerlund, 2025 in references below). I continued to further think about this, and coincidentally connected with Sally Humphrey’s 4 × 4 framework (see my adaptation below).

This 4×4 framework condenses roughly 10 pages of WIDA Language Functions and Features K-4 Narrate into one practical planning tool, while maintaining theoretical integrity and specificity to the grade level, genre, and Key Language Use. It helps teachers see how language works across the whole text, its stages and phases, sentences, and words and phrases (the levels from the Proficiency Level Descriptors). I will be developing this for each content area, and for the key disciplinary genres such as Reports, Explanations, Arguments etc – closely following Sally’s work and my analysis. But I’m drawing on a solid research-based foundation developed by Dr. Humphrey (Humphrey, 2017).

Summary: The 4×4 is the synthesis of the LFFs. It is the what of language teaching, and my TLC (Westerlund, 2024) is the how.

Intended Uses

• Bring this printout to your co-planning meeting for a narrative unit.
• Use it as your menu of language choices to teach and co-plan around.
• Identify what students need to do in their writing and select a few relevant language resources.
• Plan lessons that make those choices visible through reading, discussion, and writing.
• Teaching personal recounts or adventure narratives? There’s a difference—and it changes what language you teach! Join me in my narrative-writing workshop to explore it. The syllabus and the registration links are here.

I’m going to unveil this during my Language of Creative Writing workshop starting this Thursday.

P.S. Marley is my dog but Chat GPT doesn’t know it’s a girl – no worries, we are working on it. I’ve trained my bot SFL, now we’ll work on the other details.

For classroom use only. Not for commercial use

Cheering you on!

References

Humphrey, S. (2017). Academic literacies in the middle years: A framework for enhancing teacher knowledge and student achievement. Routledge.

Humphrey, S., Westerlund, R., & Malin, O. (2026). Building a language toolkit for teachers: A functional approach. Routledge.

Westerlund, R. (2025, July 8). Mapping WIDA’s language functions and features onto SFL metafunctions: Alignments and gaps—A trinocular analysis of the WIDA standards [Conference presentation]. International Systemic Functional Linguistics Congress, Glasgow, Scotland.

Westerlund, R. (2024). Teaching writing in the content areas: Research to practice. Colorín Colorado. https://www.colorincolorado.org/article/teaching-writing-content-areas-research-practice Colorín Colorado

About the Author

Dr. Ruslana Westerlund is a researcher and CEO at Westerlund Consulting, LLC. She works with schools, districts, and educational organizations across the globe to support the implementation of high-quality instruction that integrates language, literacy, and disciplinary learning. She is also an Executive Officer at LLEN North America (LLENA). Her work focuses on making language visible through the Teaching and Learning Cycle, the WIDA ELD Standards Framework (which she co-authored), and evidence-based approaches that provide multilingual learners with high challenge and high support.

Westerlund Consulting LLC is a certified Woman-Owned Business Enterprise (WBE) providing professional learning, curriculum design, instructional coaching, keynote presentations, and strategic consultation in disciplinary literacy, multilingual education, and language-focused instructional design. The company partners with educational organizations to build educator capacity and improve equitable access to rigorous, language-rich learning for all students.