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
suggests could help students improve vocabulary and reading comprehension (Montelongo, Hernández, Herter & Cuello, 2011). Cognates are words from two different languages which are similar in both form and meaning (ex. animal/animal or intelligence/inteligencia). This paper will investigate the literature regarding the effectiveness of cognate instruction in improving reading skills and conclude that it does have an effect on both ELL students and native English speakers who are learning Spanish. It will also hypothesize that any cognate advantages in Spanish-speaking students can be bolstered and put to better use with explicit instruction. The three studies presented in this paper suggest that using cognates could prove highly beneficial in improving the reading skills of Spanish-speaking students and help in closing the looming Hispanic/non-Hispanic demographic gap if implemented in the classroom.