Relationship Between ESL and English
The ESL standards describe the stages preceding the English standards for students learning English. As ESL students move through the ESL standards, the English standards are likely to become more appropriate for describing their English language learning. When the learning of ESL students starts to approximate the levels of the English standards of their peers, the English standards should be used instead of the ESL standards. However students are still likely to require ESL support after they have progressed to the English standards.
The information in the ESL standards will therefore continue to be relevant in the development of programs for students with an ESL background, and for the assessment of their progress. The overlap between the English standards and the ESL standards on the diagram below illustrates this point.
Diagram 1: Stages of the ESL standards in relation to the levels of the English standards
