What Teachers Should Know About the English Language

Tons of interesting information in this article. Many years ago, I took a class in linguistics and vaguely remember phonemes, morphemes, etc. Thank you for including these important facts about language in our readings. As teachers, we need to have a basic understanding of grammar to accurately correct the Ells writing. We need to know the basic language mechanics and teach them to our students and give them timely feedback on the assignments. Taking this measure will help them deepen their understanding of the English language and give them confidence in their growing ability to understand the subject. I am very interested in this study. I read that there are at least a quarter of a million words in the English language. Americans have a speaking vocabulary of about 20,000 words. There are no exact numbers, but considering our ELLs, they have a lot of challenges in terms of their language acquisition. The article talks about repeated exposure to a word to really deepen the understanding of its meaning and then finding ways to apply it in the subject. We can help the student by providing lessons involving group work, conversation and reading that will reinforce the words . We need to get to know our students well enough to help guide them into the proper programs in our schools. A recent statistic shows that about 375 million people have English as their second language. About 750 million people speak English as a foreign language. About 1-in-5 U. S. (nearly 47 million) residents regularly speak a foreign language at home.
(http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/censusstatistic/a/foreignlang.htm)
There are about 309 million people in the United States as of today. In what ways do these numbers impact our work with ELLs?