This book is designed for pre-service and K-5 educators seeking to develop their knowledge of how language works. Grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics, it serves as a practical language toolkit, offering supportive task cycles with exercises that help teachers identify, analyze, and apply language features to support student learning.

This book is essential for teacher education students and teachers for grades K-5 who are seeking to develop their pedagogical language knowledge to support their multilingual students. Through accessible, targeted, task-based resources for pre-service teachers, this guide supports teachers to build their own pedagogical language knowledge (PLK) to apply a functional approach for disciplinary purposes of narrating, informing, explaining and arguing in elementary level instruction.

Although the book focuses on unpacking the WIDA English Language Development Standards, it is well suited to support teachers’ development of language in any context.