What is ELL education in the United States?

ELL stands for English language learner(s), and refers to students in the United States school system whose home language is not English, or whose family speaks more than one language at home. It incompases a range of learners, some who have just arrived and others who have lived in the United States their whole lives.

There is an important distinction in teaching English to speakers of other languages between basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) and cognitive academic language proficiency (CALPS). Many ELLs develops BICS much more quickly than they gain CALPS. In school, oral language often progresses quickly as students interact with peers and navigate their communities, however, the high cognitive demands of academic language and literacy pose a greater challenge to their success in school. This challenge is often greater when students enter the school system in the upper grades. In order to support ELL in our schools, districts employ teachers such as myself to provide extra language and math support to English language learners, and to assess and monitor their progress.

Vermont state is a member of the WIDA Consortium, which provides high-quality standards and assessment tools to educators working with ELLs. We use the WIDA ACCESS to annually assess ELL's language development. This provides us with valuable information on students' strengths and areas of weakness and allows us to plan instruction according to students' individual needs. 

ELL services usually consist of a combination of pull-out and push-in instruction. In pull-out, students are taken from their mainstream classrooms and given focused, small group instruction to build language, literacy and academic skills that will help them better access classroom curriculum. In push-in, ELL teachers collaborate with classroom teachers to design scaffolded and differentiated learning opportunities for all students.

In Vermont, many of our ELL population are refugees from war torn countries and refugee camps abroad. Burlington, Vermont is a refugee friendly city. Our students at John F. Kennedy Elementary come from several different language backgrounds including Nepali, Mai Mai, Somali, Karen, Burmese, Sudanese, Arabic and Vietnamese. The Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program has a wealth of information regarding the populations that resettle in Vermont, including some video interviews with home-school liaisons from our district.

Because of the large number of ELLs at our school, we employ three full-time and one half-time home-school liaisons. They forge an essential connection between our families and the school, offering support in classes, interpreting for parents, and going above and beyond to help families adjust to life in the U.S. 

At Winooski School District we are fortunate to have a Superintendent, administration and school board who celebrate the diversity of our community and recognize the need inclusive practices for our large and growing ELL population.