A seven-year-old boy sits across from his Chinese-speaking ELL tutor; the boy's father also sits close by. Struggling to make sense of the strange English words on the page in front of him, Xin Wei (pseudonym, pronounced Jin Way) intuitively understands what his tutor and his father both want; i.e., they want him to read the short passage automatically and fluently. Sadly, Xin Wei is afraid he will let both of them down. Xin Wei's story is not new to classrooms across the United States. In fact, as our nation's cultural diversity continues to increase rapidly, English language learners (ELLs) laboring to build reading fluency and comprehension are a more frequent occurrence. The National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition announced that during the 2005-2006 academic year, U.S. public schools served more than five million school-aged Limited English Proficient (LEP) students. This number represents a 57% increase in the ELL population in U.S. classrooms since 1995 (NCELAQ, 2008).
