The foreign language programs in secondary schools and colleges established the effectiveness of the audio-lingual technique in teaching French, German, Spanish, and other world languages to English speakers learning a second language. These foreign language programs, as well as the ESL audio-lingual programs implemented during the late 1950s and early 1960s, were influenced by advances in the fields of structured linguistics and behavioral psychology.

At the turn of the twentieth century, in the midst of one of the largest waves of immigration into the United States, mainly from southern and eastern Europe, President Theodore Roosevelt urged that all newcomers learn English : “We should provide for every immigrant... the chance to learn English; and if after say five years he has not learned English, he should be sent back to the land from whence he came.” The national push for the rapid assimilation into American culture of all non-English-speaking populations, as reflected in President Roosevelt’s proclamation, provided the catalyst for the enactment of laws by state legislative bodies requiring English as the sole language of communication in both government affairs and education. This further spurred the growth of special curricula to help US-born and immigrant language-minority children learn English. In many cases, educators in American Indian boarding schools and in the segregated Mexican schools of the Southwest and other school settings applied these laws with so much force that students who were caught speaking their mother tongues were punished, sometimes physically, and parents were admonished for not encouraging their children to speak English.

The ELT (English Language Teaching) world continued to develop during the early twenty-first century, and new pedagogies were explored. While English language learners are, by definition, a diverse group, new attention was paid to understanding the implications of this diversity and how it could translate into more inclusive policies. Technology such as virtual reality was being explored to allow students to acquire language in a more stress-free and situational setting. The 2020s has also seen a rise in the use of artificial intelligence (AI), and it is also being explored as a tool to assist with language learning. Finally, interest in teaching English based on life skills increased, as some experts believed this was most helpful for English language learners. New strategies were also developed to manage the growing numbers of English language learners in the US. As migrant populations rose, many parts of the country saw significant increases in its English learning populations, raising new questions in school districts in how to best allocate state and federal funds to support the influx in students.

One type of ESL education is provided in the Newcomer Centers that originated in California schools. The Newcomer (or Welcome) Center is a school-within-a-school-type program for recent immigrant students. These centers typically operate in middle and high schools, preparing new arrivals for transition to mainstream education. English-language development is provided within class environments that are nurturing and supportive of language and cultural diversity.

Children and adolescents who are new arrivals without previous formal education present the greatest challenge. These students do not have the cognitive/academic skills underlying literacy in their first language, much less English. Even children who come to the United States as young children or are born in this country to parents who are poor and illiterate experience adjustment and learning difficulties in school. Children born in the United States of immigrant parents (also first-generation immigrant students) may be more fluent in English than in their heritage (home) language, or they may be more proficient in their native language than in English. Some of these first-generation immigrant students may even be balanced bilinguals, meaning they have equal proficiency in the heritage language and English.

The inadequacy of the audio-lingual programs, as well as the growth in the enrollment of a new generation of English-language learners different in many ways from those immigrant and nonimmigrant populations served by the earlier models of ESL, resulted in the expansion of English-language education. These new programs offer many instructional options to accommodate the varied needs of the learners. Recent immigrant students, for example, and a large number of first-generation immigrant students present distinctive challenges to educators based on the learners’ differing levels of English proficiency and prior education. Recent immigrant students with previous schooling in their home countries have greater ease in learning English and possess the basic knowledge and skills to cope with the academic demands of American schools.

English-language education for non-English speakers has gone through various phases of development since the early twentieth century.

Language instruction programs for young learners and adults whose native languages are not English

Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so manyChinese students go into engineering!

Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it counted when mymother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: "So easy to read."

I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated bylanguage in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language -- the way itcan evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade.And I use them all -- all the Englishes I grew up with