ELL News Headlines

'Last Night at the Telegraph Club' by Malinda Lo has won the 2021 National Book Award 2021 for Young People's Literature. The novel is set in the 1950s and follows the journey of seventeen-year-old Lily Hu as she falls in love with another young woman, set against Red-Scare paranoia.

Floaters, Martín Espada's collection of poems that explore bigotry, protests and love, is the 2021 winner of the National Book Award in poetry. The title poem draws on a tragedy: the deaths of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, 25, and his young daughter, Angie Valeria, whose bodies were found in the water along the Rio Grande.

Aryan Ashory, a young Afghan poet, left her country a few years ago with her family for security reasons. Aryan now lives in a refugee settlement in Germany, and shared her thoughts and writing with the NewsHour's Student Reporting Lab as part of their arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Equity in education is the personalized assurance that all students receive the resources they need to thrive in the academic setting. One way to do that in a class with English language learners, or multilingual students, is to leverage culturally sustaining practices, which stem from the belief that multilingual learners possess a diverse array of experiences and skills that contribute to the dynamics of the learning environment and their own academic success.

Working from drawings by pre-kindergarten students at Jere Whitson Elementary School in Cookeville, Tenn., Cindy Putman of WCTE is preparing for the unveiling of a mural-painting project inspired by Alma’s Way, the new PBS Kids series from Fred Rogers Productions.

As the numbers of English learners continue to rise in U.S. schools, the need also rises for schools and districts to increase the number of qualified (content and pedagogically proficient), culturally competent, and credentialed teachers prepared to teach them.

In a class where almost half of the students are multilingual learners who speak Spanish at home, an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teacher and a classroom teacher working together should not be unusual. Co-teaching has proved an effective way to help non-English speakers become more proficient in the English language. But finding enough ESOL teachers to meet the growing demand has been a challenge. As of 2017, the number of multilingual learners in the United States had increased by 60 percent over the past decade, making the group the fastest-growing population in the nation’s public schools, according to a Brookings Institution report.

After witnessing their government fall to the Taliban in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal, being torn away suddenly from their homeland, families and friends, and then escaping — only to spend several weeks in limbo on American military bases — thousands of young Afghan evacuees are bracing for their first days of class.

Moving to a new country can be challenging for students who don't speak their new home’s native language. The Mercer County Technical School District hopes to help these kids chart a path to success with the Newcomer Academy, a countywide program that is the first of its kind in New Jersey.

While we bring the mental health needs of our students into laser focus this year, it’s still crucial that we keep the social and emotional world of our English language learners (ELLs) front and center. Just like their peers, ELL students come to our classrooms with the burning need to be seen and acknowledged for their unique personalities, life experiences, and talents. But language challenges can obstruct all these amazing facets of their personalities. Additionally, the social pressures of suddenly being in person again and needing to communicate may make them feel anxious, isolated, and embarrassed.