Education Next – Joanne Jacobs
“Close to 5 million U.S. students—about 9 percent of public school enrollment—are ELLs. Three-quarters of them were born in the U.S. and are the children—or grandchildren—of immigrants, according to a Migration Policy Institute analysis of 2013 U.S. Census data. Nearly 80 percent of ELLs come from Spanish-speaking homes, but the rest may speak Chinese, Vietnamese, French/Haitian Creole, Arabic, or any one of hundreds of other languages. In Maine, the most common language spoken by ELLs is Somali (see Figure 1). South Carolina’s second most-common language, after Spanish, is Russian. Illinois schools enroll students from families that speak Arabic, Polish, Chinese, and Urdu.”(more)