ELL News Headlines

Immigrants bring a wealth of languages to the United States, and when teachers value those languages, children learn better – and everybody benefits, an MIT linguistics professor said at the College of Education's spring symposium. "Now there's clear recognition that students are better off when they can maintain or learn a second language," said Prof. Michel DeGraff. "Language is wealth. We need to find ways to nurture that."

The Supreme Court is debating the Trump administration’s addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census. But communities with a high number of Hispanic and immigrant families are not waiting for a decision and are putting money and resources into ambitious, targeted campaigns to ensure families fill out the census forms.

The Trump administration is proposing to tighten regulations to prevent undocumented immigrants from accessing federally subsidized housing, a move that low-income housing advocates fear will keep immigrants who are legally entitled to such benefits from receiving help.

An estimated 98,000 undocumented students graduate from U.S. high schools each year, but those graduates remain "at risk of deportation and will face severely limited opportunities to pursue further work and education," according to a new report from the Migration Policy Institute.

Poet Franny Choi reads a poem from her new book Soft Science and describes how poets of color are supporting each other.

Alex Arrow keeps expecting to see his son, Kieran Shafritz de Zoysa, walk around the corner. He imagines his boy trailing behind him at the supermarket the way he would as a young child or playing the board games he loved or the two of them making home movies as they did earlier this month in San Diego when Kieran visited on spring break. That he will never do those things again is like waking from a bad dream every single minute and praying it isn’t real, Arrow said in a phone interview Tuesday. Kieran, an 11-year-old who was on leave from Washington’s Sidwell Friends School and was finishing 18 months of school in Sri Lanka, was killed in one of the bombings on Easter Sunday that left 319 dead and more than 500 injured in Sri Lanka. He was supposed to return to Sidwell in the fall for sixth grade.

Organized by the Academy of American Poets, National Poetry Month, in April, has been celebrated annually since 1996. While reading, writing, even performing poetry should be a year-round activity, National Poetry Month is a welcome catalyst to get verse newbies and doubters interested and involved. In addition, research has repeatedly shown direct correlations between poetry and early literacy as well as poetry and reading fluency. Novels-in-verse provide an ideal fusion of poetry and narrative. Here are some affecting diverse titles by #OwnVoices authors to explore and savor this month and throughout the year.

The mother of a classmate remembered him as "an extremely artistic, sensitive, brilliant and thoughtful child." A neighbor on his street in Northwest Washington said he expected the boy "to grow up and cure cancer or become secretary general of the United Nations." And at Sidwell Friends School, which he attended from prekindergarten through fourth grade and where he planned to return for sixth grade, Kieran Shafritz de Zoysa was described as someone who was "passionate about learning" and adoring of his friends. Kieran, who was on a leave of absence from the prestigious school while living in Sri Lanka, was among the victims of the bombings there on Easter Sunday.

Eric and Alberto remember exactly when their life changed in Honduras. It was 2012. Eric was 8 and Alberto was 10. Even though the family was poor, they were content. "We were all together, and we lived very happy until my uncles were killed," Alberto said. The uncles were police officers and their killers were members of an influential gang, the boys said. So when their mother complained to law enforcement that their murders weren't being investigated, instead of justice, she began getting death threats. The family went into hiding. That marked the end of their "happy life." And it was also the end of the boys' schooling. Now, Eric is 15 and Alberto is 17. They can barely read and write, even in Spanish. Their mother decided their only hope for survival was to make the long and dangerous trek to the United States.

The teaching profession is in the midst of an "ongoing and alarming crisis," Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in an address on Thursday. In her speech at the National Press Club, Weingarten condemned the "two major roots" of the crisis that she said have led to both teachers quitting the profession and others staying far away from it — deinvestment and deprofessionalization.