Nearly one in five Americans speaks a language other than English at home; among Americans speaking languages other than English, the largest single language group is Spanish speaking (U.S. Department of Commerce, 2004). The increase in the total group of language minority individuals has been dramatic, with their proportion in the U.S. population increasing by nearly 50% over the past decade. Thus, it should not be a surprise that English language learning (ELL) students are the fastest growing subgroup in the U.S. public school population, with an annual increase of approximately 10% (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Civil Rights, 2003, as cited in McCardle, Mele-McCarthy, Cutting, Leos, & D'Emilio, 2005). To understand the key issues in teaching English literacy to children who are also in the process of learning the English language, and to determine what approaches to instruction are optimal in teaching the largest single-language group--Spanish-speaking students--federal agencies developed a partnership to fund research in this crucial area. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) has funded research on language development, reading, and reading disabilities for more than 30 years. However, not until 1999 was there a call for funding that exclusively focused on issues involving bilingual or ELL children. In what then represented an unprecedented collaborative effort, the NICHD and the U.S. Department of Education issued a research solicitation that resulted in the funding of nine grants supporting 14 projects to study reading development of ELL children. The resulting network, the Development of English Literacy in Spanish-Speaking Children (DELSS), began in 2000, and has been highly productive.