ELL Student Literature Review

Students learning English (ELL students) whose home language is Spanish are estimated to account for 7.7% of all public school students in the United States and 76.5% of ELL students (Kena et al. 2016). Adapting to and accommodating the unique needs of the large population of Spanish-speaking students in the US has been the focus of a significant amount of educational literature. Finding educational tools to help Spanish-speaking students catch up to their peers is essential in closing the 25-point reading score gap between fourth grade Hispanic and white students (Hemphill & Vanneman, 2010). One potentially promising literacy strategy includes tapping into the almost 20,000 Spanish/English cognates, which the research reviewed in this paper