ELL News Headlines

Award-winning ELL teacher Justin Minkel writes in this column, "In every strong teacher-prep program I have seen, the role of mentor teachers is crucial. But being a skilled teacher of children doesn’t automatically make you a skilled mentor of new teachers. So how do you teach someone to teach?"

September marked the 20th anniversary of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’s U.S. release. NPR asked teachers then to tell us how the book has changed the way they teach. More than 1,000 educators, from elementary teachers to university professors, responded to NPR’s callout with stories about how they incorporate the Harry Potter series into their curriculum and classrooms. Deborah Stack teaches English as a second language at a middle school in the Bronx, N.Y., and says her classroom is mainly divided between Spanish speakers and Arabic speakers. Finding engaging material in those two languages has been hard, Stack says, especially because her students vary in their reading levels in both their native languages and English. But this year, she decided to try reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone with them after she found the digital editions in both Spanish and Arabic.

Kendall A. King is professor of second language education, University of Minnesota. In this editorial, he writes, "We need to embrace multilingualism as a goal for all state students, both recent arrivals and longtime residents, by leveraging all of our communities’ resources. In policy and practice, this means creating more opportunities for world language learning and stronger English-as-a-second-language programming that builds on students’ first languages through multilingual instruction."

The students who kicked off the Spanish dual-language immersion program 10 school years ago at Parley's Park Elementary School in Utah are now sophomores at Park City High School. Last year, many proved their skills by passing the Advanced Placement test in Spanish with flying colors. Traci Evans, interim associate superintendent of teaching and learning, said 84 percent of the students scored a 3, 4 or 5, which are passing grades for the test. A total of 32 students took the exam.

For the first time, Newark students who are still learning English will gain an edge when they apply to schools this year — part of the district’s ongoing effort to ensure that all schools serve their fair share of high-needs students. The city’s computerized enrollment system, which allows families to apply to most traditional and charter schools using an online portal, has for years given a preference to low-income students and those with disabilities. But it has not previously done that for English learners, even though they are more segregated than those other groups.

A new St. Louis University course is aiming to give law students hands-on experience with immigration law. The course, Removal Defense Project: Sheltering Vulnerable Immigrant Families and Children, will begin spring semester 2019. It centers on providing aspiring attorneys with the skills necessary to defend those in jeopardy of facing removal proceedings.

Democratic Assemblyman Tony Thurmond managed to come from behind to emerge as California’s new superintendent of public instruction, beating out Marshall Tuck, a fellow Democrat and former Los Angeles executive of charter schools and educational nonprofits. Thurmond sponsored California Assembly Bill 2514 which was passed in September, allocating $300,000 in grant funding to eligible schools, county offices of education and consortia to expand or initiate new dual language immersion or developmental bilingual programs. Thurmond lived in San Jose, where he was raised by a single mother, a teacher from Panama, who died of cancer in 1974, when he was 6. He then moved to Philadelphia, where he was adopted and raised by his cousin and stepfather.

City public schools have over 3,500 students who do not speak English as a native language. The system has only 50 certified bilingual teachers to teach those students. That English Language Learner-to-bilingual teacher imbalance emerged recently during a wide-ranging, two-and-a-half-hour workshop that the Board of Alders Education Committee held in the Aldermanic Chambers on the second floor of City Hall.

A growing number of families and children apprehended at the U.S. border with Mexico are requiring medical treatment after a rigorous journey north in very crowded conditions, the head of Border Patrol said Monday. At the close of a month in which two young Guatemalan children died in federal custody, six children were among 17 migrants hospitalized with illnesses, said Kevin K. McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection.

For the first time in Newbery history, the winner and all three honor books were written by authors of color. “I get messages from people in the Philippines who are just very proud that a Filipina-American has been recognized,” says Kelly. “When you have a group of people saying they’re so proud you’re representing the community, it’s like ‘Whoa.’” Lara Saguisag, an assistant professor at the College of Staten Island, hopes Kelly’s novels and success help Filipino and Filipino-American kids “recognize they are worthy of being in stories” and even inspire them to create their own.