Why Knowing About Your ELLs' Literacy Backgrounds Matters

In our United States, we have more than 5.3 million English learners that are attending public schools in the United States, and they speak a variety of languages. Spanish appears to be the most common language spoken amongst this group, with getting close to 80%. And many others are at about 2%, maybe getting a little bit closer to 3%, such as Arabic and Portuguese and Vietnamese.

So one of the things that's so important about our students who come from linguistically diverse backgrounds, some people call them English learners, others emergent bilinguals, multilinguals, but what we know is that they are not one single group. They come to us, some of them might have had their home language and home language literacy very developed, others might come to us with not as developed home language or home language literacy, so it's up to us to know about these students.

Who are they? What are their experiences? What are their levels of language proficiency and literacy proficiency? And how did they do in their home language? Because that very much is correlated to how they'll do in this new language of English.