English Learners

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...

Students who come to the classroom as refugees often bring with them a host of unique opportunities and challenges. First, a little clarity: Refugees end up in the United States after fleeing unsafe situations in their home countries. Immigrants, in contrast, are people who have purposefully chosen to come to...

There are several strands that feed into successful language acquisition for an English Learner (EL), as students must master skills such as vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, and syntax. Blended learning with language-learning software allows students to learn these skills at their own pace with targeted instruction as needed. Another important component...

Family engagement has been widely accepted as one of the key factors that supports student achievement, reduces dropout rates, and positively impacts children’s learning in many other ways. It is defined as the mutual, ongoing relationship between families and educators that is built on trust and respect and is focused...

Many literacy educators are concerned about meeting the diverse needs of English language learners (ELLs), and rightly so. Using dual-language education programs, educational technology, and in-class instructional support, educators have made strides in helping students learn and master the English language...

To be sufficiently prepared for college and the workforce, all students must have strong digital literacy skills. In today’s marketplace, it's not only white-collar jobs that require digital literacy and ease of media use to present, record, and analyze data—blue-collar workers are expected to look for ways to increase productivity,...

New types of edtech are being developed all the time, bringing new opportunities to students around the country—and creating difficult choices for educators and administrators. With so many excellent products on the market, how can we possibly choose the right edtech resources for our students? Often, these difficult decisions come...

Vocabulary is frequently thought to be the main component of oral language. However, in the broadest definition, oral language consists of phonology, grammar, morphology, vocabulary, discourse, and pragmatics. The acquisition of these skills often begins at a young age, before students begin focusing on print-based concepts such as sound-symbol correspondence...