ELL News Headlines

Children’s book creator LeUyen Pham remembers the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic as a time of contrasts and confusion. With her husband and kids at home, the house was suddenly loud all the time, while Los Angeles was abnormally quiet. Unanswerable questions swirled everywhere. So Pham did what authors do. She wrote. Within months, she turned her jotted-down ideas into the text and art for Outside, Inside, a picture book published in January.

As Asian American communities reel from an uptick in violence and hate spurred by racist rhetoric about the coronavirus pandemic, advocates are urging Americans to be allies in actionable ways that go beyond words. Asian American community leaders shared advice with the PBS NewsHour about ways Americans can help.

When the crime rate began to rise in their native Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Lorena Diaz-Germes' parents made a life-changing decision. They would take their small family and immigrate to the United States, leaving behind everything and everyone they knew, in order to provide their two kids with greater educational and life opportunities. It’s a sacrifice Diaz-Germes, a DACA recipient, Honors student, and Criminal Justice major, doesn't take for granted, and one she knows didn't come easily for her parents.

There is a common misconception in the education community that allowing students who are English-language learners (ELLs) to use their first language in the classroom will slow down their English learning process. Three Rider University graduates are working to change that. 

Newcomers to the United States often have low-proficiency in English but, depending upon their age, might have had considerable education in their home language. What are the most effective teaching strategies educators can use with this population, which is likely to grow in coming months and years?

The number of migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border this year is on pace to be the highest in 20 years, one of U.S. President Joe Biden’s top officials said this week, a rise that includes an increase in unaccompanied children.

Learn how schools can respond to the increase in bullying of Asian American and Pacific Islander students during the COVID-19 pandemic. This Colorín Colorado section includes articles about the issue, classroom resources, and more, as well as resources in response to the shooting deaths of eight people, six of whom were Asian women, in Atlanta, Georgia.

More than 170 years ago, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma didn’t have much. The tribe suffered devastation starting in 1831, when it became the first of many Native American tribes to be forcibly removed from its homeland in the SoutheasternU.S. Disease, starvation and severe winter weather took the lives of at least 4,000 Choctaws and thousands of other Native Americans in what some historians have called the “Indian Holocaust.” Sixteen years after they arrived in what is now Oklahoma, the Choctaws tried to rebuild their lives. At a tribal meeting, they heard of families struggling to survive Ireland’s infamous Potato Famine. They took up a collection, pooled together $170 and sent it to a group collecting money in New York. Fast-forward to the worst pandemic in modern times: The Irish are repaying the generosity they received two centuries earlier from Native Americans. About 24,000 donors from Ireland have given roughly $820,000 in an online fundraiser operated by Native American volunteers to buy food and supplies for families on the Hopi and Navajo reservations in Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA), recently signed into law by President Joe Biden, includes billions in funding for public education, libraries, early childhood programs, and internet connectivity resources.

A Stamford, Connecticut, teacher is being heralded a hero after she generously took in the newborn brother of one of her students whose mother sick with the coronavirus. Thirty-two-year-old Luciana Lira teaches at Hart Magnet Elementary School and knew she had to do something when her 7-year-old student Junior's entire family came down with the coronavirus at the same time his mother, Zully, whose last name has not been revealed, was going into labor. So the teacher did what she had to for a family in need.