When Louizze Tabada came to the United States with her family from the Philippines at age 10, she spoke little English and limited herself in class to asking permission to go to the bathroom or borrow a pencil.

She clung to a group of Filipino students who spoke Tagalog, a language spoken in the Philippines, greeting them with phrases like, “Kumusta?” which means, “How are you?”

But after 17 months in the English Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) program at Wellwood International Elementary here, Louizze is not only speaking English well but she is able to read her favorite Harry Potter books.

“When I first came here I made friends with Filipino students, but now I have friends from India and Japan,” said Louizze, who still has a slight trace of an accent. “I like reading now. I can understand it better than last year. I like the Harry Potter series. I like the fantasy and adventure.”

Louizze is part of the changing face of ESOL in Maryland. A program once thought of as a service primarily for Spanish-speakers, it now helps students in Maryland who speak 232 languages.

A one-story, red, brick school, Wellwood, boasts of its diversity with a sign that says hello in many different languages outside the main office and international flags hanging in the lobby.

The school, located in a quiet middle class neighborhood, is a good example of Maryland’s increasing diversity.

At one time its ESOL program had a large number of Russians students, reflecting the influx of Russians who settled in Northwest Baltimore and Pikesville after emigrating from the former Soviet Union. There is still a noticeable Russian presence in the area – restaurants, groceries, even a video store – but for the most part the students have passed school age and moved on.

Today, the faces and the accents are Asian. Because of the recruitment effort in the Philippines by local hospitals, Tagalog is the main language spoken by ESOL students at Wellwood.

It was not until the 1980s that the state began identifying ESOL learners as a separate learning group. Before that some local school districts such as Prince George’s County and Montgomery County provided language support in the 1970s or late 1960s.

But otherwise, immigrant students had to sink or swim in regular classes.

Now most of the ESOL students are in the Washington or Baltimore metropolitan areas – Prince George’s, Montgomery, Howard, Anne Arundel, Frederick and Baltimore Counties and Baltimore City – which have experienced large inflows of immigration.

In Baltimore County, for example, the number of ESOL students has more than doubled since 1995.

This trend is mirrored across the state as a whole, where the number of ESOL students has grown in the past 11 years from 4,305 to 35,666, almost a 150 percent increase, according to data from the Maryland State Department of Education.

And while Spanish is still the leading language of those in the ESOL program and their numbers are still increasing, there have also been marked increases in students who speak Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, French and a category called World English, or English as spoken and written in other parts of the world such as Jamaica and Nigeria.

But