ELL News Headlines

Days after a single senator blocked legislation approving two long-awaited additions to the Smithsonian Institution — a National Museum of the American Latino and a museum dedicated to women's history — Congress has officially authorized their creation.

The disruption to in-school learning caused by the global pandemic this year has hit the nation’s 5 million English-language learners especially hard. Now, millions face yet another predicament: being asked to return to schools to take federally required English-language-proficiency exams amid the national surge in coronavirus cases.

The new question-of-the-week is: "What are some of the most common mistakes teachers make when working with ELLs, and what should they do, instead?" In this post, this six-part series is "wrapped up" by Valentina Gonzalez, Joseph F. Johnson Jr., Ph.D., Maria L. González, Ed.D., and Consuelo Manriquez, Ed.D., and Karen Nemeth and Jane Hill.  I'm also including comments from readers.

Santiago Potes is one of the hundreds of thousands of DACA-recipients currently living in the U.S. His parents fled Colombia when he was four years old, traveling with Potes to Miami. Now, Potes, 23, is a graduate of Columbia University and also the first Latino DACA recipient to be awarded a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. "I just couldn't believe it," he tells NPR's Morning Edition. "I just thought that they were going to call me, and say 'Oh, we made a mistake. Sorry about that, we actually didn't choose you.' " Santiago says his love for learning really took off when he was selected for Marina Esteva's gifted classroom at Sweetwater Elementary when he was in the second grade.

Children don't often get to read stories by or about Latinos. The American book publishing industry remains overwhelmingly white, according to the Cooperative Children's Book Center, which found only five percent of books published for young readers are by or about Latinx people. But several new groups of writers, editors and agents are trying to increase Latino representation in children's literature. They're working in different ways, and have their own stories to tell. NPR's Mandalit Del Barco spoke to a few of them — and got some reading recommendations, too.

The story of Mia and her family and friends at the Calivista Motel continues in this powerful, hilarious, and resonant sequel to the award-winning novel Front Desk. We had the pleasure of chatting to author Kelly Yang about Three Keys, book recommendations, writing advice, and more!

"Sesame Street" in the past year has tackled everything from foster care to substance abuse. Now its latest effort is trying to help children suffering as a result of the Syrian civil war.

The new Rising Voices Library is a collection of books from Scholastic that feature underrepresented communities in children's literature. Dedicated to black and Latino boys, the collection contains 300 nonfiction, fiction and biographical titles. Scholastic Vice President and Executive Editor Andrea Davis Pinkney says there’s a “dearth of diversity” in children’s literature. As a mother with a black son, she says the books in the collection have relevant themes: family, culture, heroes and role models. Along with the books, the collection comes with storage bins, book stickers, teachers’ guides and teaching cards. For parents, Davis Pinkney says buying a few books from the collection can help prevent what’s known as the summer slide — the tendency for kids’ reading ability to decline over the summer.

The coronavirus pandemic and school closures across the nation have exposed deep inequities within education: technology access, challenges with communication, lack of support for special education students, to name just a few. During this crisis, there are still opportunities to provide students with tools to help them be independent learners, according to Zaretta Hammond, author of "Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain." Hammond shared three design principles of culturally responsive instruction that can be used to support students’ cognitive development from afar in her webinar, “Moving Beyond the Packet: Creating More Culturally Responsive Distance Learning Experiences.” She said it’s important to stay focused on the student and offer small but high-leverage practices that maintain student progress and increase intellectual capacity during this time. She said these tips and activities also work for students without reliable access to technology and the internet.

The Latino Book Review has released a free online archive of English translations of Nahuatl folktales. The stories were translated to English from the native Nahuatl folktales collected by Pablo González Casanova in Cuentos Indígenas, which was published by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The translated stories include titles such as “The Lion and the Cricket”, “The Gardener Child”, “The Maiden and the Beast”, and “The Red Grasshopper”.