ELL News Headlines

Two years ago this month, Mayada Anjari was only dimly aware that a holiday was approaching. After the family's three-year journey as refugees from Syria, her sons — Hayan, Mohammed and Abdulrazaq — had just started school here; her husband, Ahmad Abdulhamid, was looking for work; and she had a baby girl, Jana, to chase after. This fall, Jana began prekindergarten, and fans of Ms. Anjari's food helped her publish a cookbook of Syrian recipes. So she decided to take a test run at making her first Thanksgiving feast. Before she even began cooking, there were many mysteries to be solved. Were the apples really going to be baked with cinnamon, a spice that Ms. Anjari uses with meat and chicken? Why would you roast a bird whole — how would it get evenly cooked that way? How can macaroni and cheese, one of her children’s favorite dinners, be a side dish? Were the mashed potatoes not going to be seasoned with a little garlic and a lot of caramelized onions, the way she makes them?

Two days before Thanksgiving two years ago, Sloane Davidson received a telephone call and a request. "We have a family for you and want to know if you want to invite them to Thanksgiving dinner." Davidson had signed up with a service organization to invite a family of refugees to a meal, she told her audience during a recent program at Mt. Lebanon Public Library. And a couple and their three children who fled from Syria were interested in participating. With the blessing of the hosts of her own family's Thanksgiving dinner, Davidson made the necessary arrangements. "And so this family did, sight unseen, knock on our door and come join us for Thanksgiving dinner," the mother of two said. The occasion helped lead to her founding Hello Neighbor, a Pittsburgh-based mentorship program supporting recently resettled refugees and their families, in January 2017.

Local students are partnering with a nonprofit organization to collect blankets for immigrant families. Sarah Hudson, social studies teacher at Advanced Learning Academy, is leading A Blanket For The Journey Project. "The students are doing a 'Speak up, Speak out,' which asks them to identify a problem in the world and try to solve it," Hudson said. 

On the morning of Election Day, the top trending search on Google was "donde votar," which means "where to vote" in Spanish. Voter access to the polls was a major issue during the 2018 midterm elections in the U.S. Charges of voter suppression were made in in Georgia and North Dakota. Critics of new voting rules claimed they disenfranchised African-Americans and Native Americans.  While those problems were extensively covered by the press, less attention was paid to another problem that can affect voter turnout: the availability of foreign-language ballots.

After 10 years of consistent gains, the number of immigrant families enrolled in SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, fell by 10 percent in 2018. Particularly, for families who had been in the U.S for fewer than five years. The finding comes from new research presented this month at the American Public Health Association annual conference. The study surveyed 35,000 immigrant mothers of U.S. citizen children in five U.S. cities, including Boston and Baltimore. Lead researcher Allison Bovell-Ammon at Boston Medical Center says the research is preliminary and there are many possible explanations for the drop in enrollment, including an improved economy. Still, she suspects the data could be a reflection of the many news stories reported this year, of families who have chosen to leave social benefit programs out of fear it could impact their immigration status.

An 88-year-old Carson City woman who has dedicated the past 15 years helping people throughout Northern Nevada learn English and become American citizens is among 10 finalists selected by CNN as a Top Hero for 2018.

Sam Larson was looking for loopholes. Crouched on the floor of a sunny student building at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, Sam was surrounded by cardboard, scissors, rulers and about a dozen other high school students. All of them were attending a residential summer "Acceleration Academy" hosted at the university by the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program, or ANSEP. ANSEP now serves 2,500 students, from middle school through graduate school. As a group, outperform most of the rest of the country on measures of math and science. Two of the program's graduates are likely first Alaska Natives in the world to hold doctorate's in their fields. Another ANSEP grad has begun doctoral work in Colorado and a fourth has been accepted to a doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley.

Shelves of colorfully illustrated Spanish-language books and card games, multilingual e-books, comic books and CDs lined the halls of the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, where 3,000 people gathered last week to exchange ideas on how to improve dual-language education. La Cosecha, Dual Language Education of New Mexico’s 23rd annual conference, drew teachers, presenters and vendors from 41 states, nine Native American tribes and nine foreign nations.

There wasn't an English word for the color 'orange' until 200 years after the citrus fruit of the same name arrived in Europe. Before then, the color was called by the two other colors that, when mixed, make orange: 'yellow-red' This is just one striking example of the ways in which color categories are shaped by culture. Ancient languages, including Greek, Chinese, Hebrew, and Japanese, didn't have a word for blue. And Russian speakers have two distinct category words for light blue vs dark blue: Something is never 'blue,' in Russian, it’s either 'siniy' (dark blue) or 'goluboy' (light blue.)

The monkey's fur is worn away. It's nearly a century old. A well-loved toy, it is barely 4 inches tall. It was packed away for long voyages, on an escape from Nazi Germany, to Sweden and America. And now, it's the key to a discovery that transformed my family.