ELL News Headlines

Montserrat Garibay arrived in the United States three decades ago with her mother and sister as an undocumented immigrant, and learned English at a public middle school in Austin, Texas. Later on, she worked as a bilingual pre-kindergarten teacher before becoming a labor organizer in Texas, first representing Austin public school employees and then serving as a top leader of the Texas AFL-CIO. For the past four years, she’s been at the U.S. Department of Education, first as the senior adviser for labor relations to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and, for the past two years, as deputy assistant secretary and director of the department’s office of English-language acquisition.

Black and Latino students in New York City are far less likely to receive an automatic admissions offer than their white and Asian American peers, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of city data.

The Young Adult Library Services Association announced the finalists for the 2025 William C. Morris and Excellence in Nonfiction awards.

Even after publishing four novels, Laila Lalami — the 2023-2024 Catherine A. and Mary C. Gellert Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute — said she still describes herself as a “guest” in the English language.

The trilingual author grew up speaking both Arabic and French in post-colonial Morocco. Enrolled at a French primary school, her introduction to the written word came via French children’s classics like “Tintin” and “Asterix.” As an English major at Université Mohammed-V in Rabat, Lalami began to resent how early French education had prevented her from developing that initial literary connection to Arabic. 

Rachel Herrera is a physics teacher at Mission High School in San Francisco. In this essay, she writes, "My favorite part of my job is not actually part of my job. As a public high school teacher in a state and district with a teacher’s union, my contract entitles me to a “duty-free” lunch. Over the years, however, I have willingly and somewhat proudly developed a lunch crew."

Eleven-year-old Shayla had never taken music classes before she emigrated from the Dominican Republic this year and enrolled at P.S. 103 Hector Fontanez in the Bronx. The fifth grader is still hesitant to speak in English, which she said she’s learning “little by little.” But when it comes to music, she has a different tune.

Tributes have been paid to the two victims who died in the shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, on Monday, who have been named as 42-year-old teacher Erin M. West and 14-year-old student Rubi P. Vergara.

Today’s post begins a series exploring unique challenges in teaching ELLs and how we can best rise to them.

In Aurora, high school students who are learning English as a new language spend 45 minutes per day in a class specifically designed to help them improve their language skills. But their teachers have been on their own to design the lessons that are key to helping students understand the rest of their classes with native English speakers.

Across more than five decades and three dozen books, Nikki Giovanni wrote poetry and prose that bridged the public and private spheres, celebrating Black identity, attacking white supremacy and extolling ordinary pleasures such as artichoke soup and a mother’s warm embrace. Her work often paid homage to earlier Black artists and activists, and made her an elder stateswoman among African American poets.