English Learners

Many researchers have determined that labeling immigrant students as English language learners establishes conditions for failure as they experience the inequity of our school system. For years, ELL students have been regarded as students who come with a deficit, or gaps, in their knowledge. The assumption is that these students...

In his 2019 piece for The Nation magazine, North Hollywood High School senior Scott Lee noted: “It’s easy to forget that the United States has no official language.” Writing from the perspective of a non-native English speaker, Lee recounted how he was able to “understand everything” in the Koreatown neighborhood...

Rochester, Minnesota-based teacher Laura Lenz works with English Learners (ELs) at a center for students who are immigrants and refugees. In a blog post on the website Cult of Pedagogy, Lenz posited the following: Imagine a school where we focused on the strengths of English language learners. What if these...

Millions of K–12 students in the United States are non-native English speakers or English learners (ELs), a status that has historically been seen as a deficit or problem requiring correction. Indeed, as teacher and linguist Kristen Lindahl wrote in a post for the TESOL blog, “While the overwhelming majority of teachers...

There are students who are English Learners (ELs), there are students who have dyslexia... and there are also ELs who have dyslexia. In a video presentation on the subject of EL students who may also have dyslexia, Dr. Fumiko Hoeft of the University of California, San Francisco discussed the difficulty...

Schools and districts commonly use the terms “EL” or “ELL” when describing English (language) learners in the United States. While this terminology is widely accepted and understood, it fails to highlight one of the most important aspects of students learning English in schools: They are becoming bilingual. In fact, some...

Students who require English language support in school are on the rise in the United States. These students—known as English learners, or ELs—now make up around 10% of the school-age population, which adds up to nearly 5 million children overall. A larger concentration of EL students reside in some states,...

In 2017, the U.S. Department of Education awarded a multimillion-dollar grant to Aquinas College in Michigan intended to address the shortage of English Learner (EL) professionals in that state. A press release about the grant outlined the gravity of the situation, noting that “about 88,000 students in Michigan need an...

In an October 2018 report to Congress, the United States Department of Education revealed troubling statistics regarding English Learners and their teachers: Only five states are succeeding in helping ELs meet language, reading, and mathematics goals. Even more discouragingly, the data indicates that success rates are declining. What can this...

In classrooms across the United States, there is a growing number of English learners (ELs)—students who need support in order to become proficient in English—and their numbers have been rising steadily since at least 2000, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Per the center's data, just over 9...