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The WIDA Key Uses are the categories of academic language WIDA uses to describe how students use language to do school work across every subject. One important update: in the WIDA ELD Standards Framework, 2020 Edition, these were renamed Key Language Uses and revised to four genres, Narrate, Inform, Explain, and Argue (replacing the earlier Recount, Explain, Argue, and Discuss). This guide explains each current Key Language Use, how they connect to the WIDA standards, and how district leaders should use them.
Table of contents
Executive Summary
The WIDA Key Uses, now formally the Key Language Uses, name the main ways students use language to participate in academic work. In the 2020 Edition, WIDA defined four: Narrate, Inform, Explain, and Argue. These genres recur across all content areas, a student narrates in history, informs in science, explains a process, and argues a claim in English language arts.
For district leaders, the Key Language Uses are a tool for making academic language instruction concrete and consistent, and all four are fundamentally about students producing language, much of it spoken. WIDA identifies the most prominent Key Language Uses for each grade cluster to help educators plan.
Key Takeaways
- The four current Key Language Uses are Narrate, Inform, Explain, and Argue (2020 Edition).
- The term changed: the older framework called them Key Uses (Recount, Explain, Argue, Discuss).
- They cut across all subjects, giving a common language for academic tasks.
- All four emphasize producing language, much of it spoken.
- WIDA flags the most prominent ones per grade cluster to guide planning.
The Four WIDA Key Language Uses
The table lists the four Key Language Uses from the 2020 Edition and what students do with each.
| Key Language Use | What Students Do | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Narrate | Convey real or imagined experiences through stories and histories | Recount a historical event in sequence |
| Inform | Provide factual information: define, describe, compare, categorize | Describe the steps of an experiment |
| Explain | Give reasons, causes, or how something works | Explain why seasons change |
| Argue | Make and support a claim with evidence and reasoning | Argue a position in a debate or essay |
Quick answer: the WIDA Key Uses, now called Key Language Uses, are Narrate, Inform, Explain, and Argue, the main ways students use academic language across all subjects.
What Changed in the 2020 Edition
If you learned the older WIDA framework, the terminology shifted. The 2012-era framework listed four Key Uses: Recount, Explain, Argue, and Discuss. The 2020 Edition renamed them Key Language Uses and revised the set to Narrate, Inform, Explain, and Argue, aligning them with broad genre families found in content standards. Explain and Argue carried over; Narrate and Inform replaced Recount and Discuss.
How the Key Language Uses Connect to the WIDA Standards
The Key Language Uses run through the five WIDA English Language Development Standards, which cover social and instructional language plus the language of language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. A science lesson might require students to inform and explain; a social studies lesson might require narrating events and arguing causes. The Key Language Uses are the genres that connect language development to content learning.
How District Leaders Can Use the Key Language Uses
- Plan tasks around them. Build lessons that ask students to narrate, inform, explain, or argue with content.
- Scaffold each genre. Provide sentence frames and models specific to arguing versus informing, for example.
- Use the grade-cluster guidance. Emphasize the Key Language Uses WIDA flags as most prominent for each grade band.
- Prioritize spoken production. Each Key Language Use can be practiced aloud, which is where students get the least practice.
District Benchmark: Genre Coverage, Not Genre Awareness
The Key Language Uses are easy to adopt on paper and hard to audit in practice, so the useful district metric is coverage rather than awareness. Take a middle school of 1,100 students with 165 identified English Learners.
Ask a simple question of any content department: over the last month, how many times did each English Learner produce an extended spoken argument? Not answer a question, not contribute to a discussion, but make a claim and support it aloud for long enough that someone could evaluate the reasoning. In most buildings the honest answer is zero or close to it, and the same audit run on Narrate and Inform returns a much higher number, because recall and retell questions are the natural currency of whole-class questioning.
That imbalance is the finding. Districts do not fail to teach the Key Language Uses; they cover two of them heavily and two of them barely, and the two that get short-changed are the two that require sustained production. Across 165 students, a semester of lopsided genre exposure is a measurable instructional gap that no one has written down, because nobody counts genres.
Four Genres Divided by One Teacher
Covering four genres aloud runs straight into the Speaking Time Gap: the shortfall between the responsive spoken practice an English Learner needs and what one teacher can supply across a full class. The Key Language Uses make the shortfall easier to quantify than usual, because they give you something countable.
The math, counted in productions per genre. Take a class of 27 across a semester of roughly 90 lessons. Suppose each lesson includes one spoken genre task and the teacher can genuinely hear and respond to five students during it, which is an optimistic figure once content instruction is also happening. That is 450 attended spoken productions across the semester, or about 16 per student. Spread across Narrate, Inform, Explain, and Argue, each student produces roughly four attended instances of each genre in half a school year. Four attempts at arguing aloud, with feedback, is not a number from which a genre develops.
And that is the even distribution, which does not occur. In practice the productions concentrate in Narrate and Inform, so a given English Learner may finish a semester having never constructed a spoken argument that anyone responded to. The framework asks for four genres. The delivery capacity supports something closer to two.
Common Mistakes District Leaders Make
- Using outdated terminology. Referring to Recount and Discuss instead of the current Narrate, Inform, Explain, and Argue.
- Over-weighting one genre. Defaulting to informing or narrating while neglecting argument.
- Treating them as writing-only. Much of their value is in spoken production.
- Leaving them to EL specialists. The Key Language Uses belong in every content classroom.
Recommended Actions
Immediate (this month): Confirm your EL team is using the current Key Language Uses (Narrate, Inform, Explain, Argue), not the older Key Uses.
Medium-term (this year): Build spoken narrate, inform, explain, and argue tasks into content instruction with scaffolds.
Long-term (strategy): Resource individual speaking practice so every student gets enough practice across all four Key Language Uses.
Questions District Leaders Should Ask
- Are we using the current Key Language Uses, or outdated terminology?
- Do our lessons balance all four genres, or default to one?
- Are students practicing each Key Language Use aloud, not just in writing?
- Do content teachers, not just EL staff, use the Key Language Uses?
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the WIDA Key Uses?
The WIDA Key Uses, renamed Key Language Uses in the 2020 Edition, are four categories of academic language: Narrate, Inform, Explain, and Argue. They describe the main ways students use language to do academic work across all subjects and connect language development to content learning.
Did the WIDA Key Uses change?
Yes. The older framework listed Recount, Explain, Argue, and Discuss as Key Uses. The 2020 Edition renamed them Key Language Uses and revised the set to Narrate, Inform, Explain, and Argue. Explain and Argue stayed; Narrate and Inform replaced Recount and Discuss.
How do teachers use the Key Language Uses?
Teachers design tasks that ask students to narrate, inform, explain, or argue about content, scaffold each genre with appropriate sentence frames and models, and emphasize the genres WIDA flags as most prominent for each grade cluster.
How do the Key Language Uses relate to the WIDA standards?
They run through the five WIDA English Language Development Standards, connecting the language of language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies to specific academic-language genres students perform.
Related Resources
- Complete Guide to WIDA
- WIDA Can Do Descriptors
- WIDA Levels Explained
- Best Strategies for EL Speaking Practice
- Oral Language Development for English Learners
Conclusion
The WIDA Key Uses, now the Key Language Uses, turn academic language from an abstract goal into four concrete genres teachers can plan around in any subject: Narrate, Inform, Explain, and Argue. Their power is also their challenge: all four are about producing language, much of it spoken, and that is exactly what a classroom of 25 cannot provide individually. Districts that use the current terminology, balance all four genres, and resource the spoken practice they require give English Learners the academic language the WIDA standards are built around.
Sources: WIDA, ELD Standards Framework (Key Language Uses); WIDA ELD Standards Framework, 2020 Edition (PDF); WIDA Consortium.
Giving Every Student a Turn to Narrate, Inform, Explain, and Argue
The Key Language Uses read cleanly on a lesson plan. Then class starts, and a teacher asks students to argue a claim aloud or explain a process in their own words, and the same reality lands: a handful speak, the rest listen, and the students who most need to produce the genre are the ones who say the least.
The framework did not fail here. Writing a paragraph is something a class does all at once; having each student narrate, inform, explain, and then argue aloud, with someone actually responding to what they said, is four productions per child that a single teacher cannot hear in a period. The constraint is arithmetic, not the design of the standards.
This is why some districts are adding spoken practice in these genres that does not wait for the teacher’s turn to come around. Telo AI is one example, with adaptive conversation aligned to the WIDA proficiency levels across narrating, informing, explaining, and arguing, plus Spanish and French for dual-language classrooms.
See how every student gets spoken practice in each genre: https://mytelo.ai/how-telo-works/
The Key Language Uses define what academic language should sound like across every subject. The programs that make them real are the ones that give each student enough turns to actually produce all four aloud, and that treat the practice capacity as something to resource rather than a gap the framework alone can close.
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