ELL News Headlines

Danielle Colayco starts every day talking to her 5-year-old daughter, Audrey, in Tagalog. She greets her good morning, asks her some simple questions and tells her that she loves her. The second-generation Filipina American grew up in Southern California, not knowing a word of her family’s language. But during quarantine, she started taking weekly online Tagalog classes through the program Tagalog With Kirby, while her daughter participates virtually through TagalogKids.com.

Lynette Stant teaches third grade in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian community in Arizona. For our Learning Curve series, she shares what a week of virtual learning is like.

The magnitude of the crisis facing President Biden at the U.S.-Mexico border came into clearer focus Wednesday as the new administration was holding record numbers of unaccompanied migrant teens and children in detention cells for far longer than legally allowed and federal health officials fell further behind in their race to find space for them in shelters.

So-called "learning pods" cropped up across the country in primarily white, wealthy neighborhoods last year as the pandemic first brought schools to a close. In more recent months, several organizations in low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods in Boston have pulled together to offer similar options to their local students. Amanda Fernández, co-founder of Latinos for Education, and Vanessa Calderón-Rosado, executive director of Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción, joined Jim Braude to talk about one such effort in Boston.

The Biden administration wants to use the Federal Emergency Management Agency in South Texas to help cope with the growing number of migrant adults and children crossing from Mexico, according to two people familiar with the proposal. FEMA support in Texas would be primarily aimed at testing and potentially quarantining family groups and adults before their release from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The number of apprehensions made along the Mexico border has pushed even higher over the past week, with agents taking more than 4,000 people into custody every day — a level of enforcement activity that nears the 2019 crisis.

There are enough myths about emergent bilinguals to drive English learner (EL) educators crazy trying to correct them all. We’ve gathered six of the most common myths and looked to see if, by dispelling them, we might uncover truths about teaching and learning that extend beyond the EL classroom to offer insights for teachers of any subject.

Charleigh Romero-Rodriguez is being honored through the 2020 Hispanic Heritage Foundation Awards for her efforts in social justice, presented by Nike. In the award's program (p. 26), Rodriguez's passion for equity is highlighted, stating "she feels firmly that everyone should be appreciated for who they are and who they choose to be". She works on the YWCA Junior board, helping women who face abuse. Rodrigues has used her time during the pandemic to read to children over Zoom and form pen-pal relationships with those in nursing homes.

Bonita Webb has been going above and beyond to support her students for more than 20 years, which is one of the many reasons why the Kent School District named her the 2020-2021 Teacher of the Year in Kent. Webb, an English Language Learner (ELL) teacher, started teaching in the district in 1991 and has since played an important role in opening the ELL center at Cedar Heights. She also helps train new teachers as part of the Washington Education Association and University of Washington’s Culturally Responsive Teacher Series collaboration.

The phrase "learning loss" is everywhere in articles and discussions about COVID’s impact on education. Many teachers, however, have concerns about how that phrase is being interpreted by policymakers now and what the responses to that interpretation could look like in the fall.