EFFECTIVE READING INSTRUCTIONS

Effective Reading Instructions

Effective Reading Instructions

In 2007, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the number of people in the U.S. from ethnic or racial minorities has risen from 47 million in 2000 to more than 100 million, or around one third of the population. The fastest-growing groups are the Hispanic population (at a rate of 3.4% annually) and the Asians at an annual rate of 3.2%. (Tom, 2006)The growth in immigrant populations or language minorities has drastically changed the student compositions in U.S. schools. There were about 1.3 million language minority students, accounting for approximately 3% of the school student population in 1990. In 2001, it increased to 4.5 million, taking up approximately 9.6% of the total PreK-12 enrollment. It is projected that by 2015, about 30% of the school-aged population in the United States will be language minorities. (Tom, 2006)

The changing demographics have posed unprecedented challenges for the public school system to accommodate a variety of needs for English language learners (ELLs) including their sociolinguistic, sociocul-tural, and socioemotional development. To date, there is a consensus among educators that to successfully address the increasingly diverse student populations and ensure language minority students' academic achievement, school instruction must be culturally responsive or reciprocal to students' linguistic and cultural backgrounds. For teachers and schools to be culturally reciprocal to students' diverse backgrounds, it is essential that they learn who the students are, what factors influence their learning inside and outside school, and what kinds of resources are available to these learners. To this end, in this chapter, we provide an overview of the issues related to ELLs. We first present a brief description of how language learners are defined in literature and types of instructional programs available to them. Following this, we discuss factors that affect the academic achievement of ELLs, effective instructional strategies to overcome these factors, and the assessment of ELLs. Finally, we conclude the chapter with suggestions for future directions in the field. (Tom, 2006)

ELLs are also referred to as students with limited English proficiency (LEP) in the educational literature and documents in the United States. Although these terms are used interchangeably, in recent years, the term English language learners has become the preferred term among educators and researchers instead of LEP because of the latter term's negative connotation. In this chapter, both ELLs and LEP students are used to reflect the usages in different reports. In general, ELLs are those who speak language(s) other than English at home and who learn English as the dominant language of the media and education in the host culture. In a report released by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), LEP or ELL students are defined as individuals who were not born in the United States or whose native language is a language other than English; individuals who come from environments where a language other than English is dominant; or individuals who are American Indians or Alaskan Natives and who come from environments where a language other than English has had ...