ELL News Headlines

Dorina Sackman, a middle school teacher in Orlando, Fla., uses a writing "recipe" and manipulatives to teach her 8th grade English-language learners how to structure a five-paragraph essay. Students practice crafting a thesis statement and organizing three supporting arguments.

Kathi Littlejohn can get lost in the Cherokee stories of her heritage. At home in Western North Carolina, Littlejohn and her fellow tribal members in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians are surrounded not only by stories but by the mountains, rivers and seasons that inspired them centuries ago. Too often, though, Cherokee people drive by these places of cultural importance without ever knowing what happened there. That’s a problem Littlejohn is hoping to fix through her latest project, a series of short videos "Cherokee History & Stories: What Happened Here."

Three dozen Schenectady High School students joined the ranks of the Class of 2018 Thursday morning. After they walked the stage of the high school auditorium in their red and blue gowns, earning the cheers and smiles of family and friends present for the annual summer commencement ceremony, the new graduates described the hurdles they overcame on their way to a diploma. Nawaf Hassan and his family moved to Schenectady from Yemen four years ago; when he arrived as a new student, he spoke hardly any English, he said.

When San Benito, Texas, school leaders learned of an influx of children to a migrant shelter in their small town near the U.S.-Mexico border, they felt obliged to help. While a government contractor bears responsibility for educating children at the highly guarded center, local officials say they stepped up partly because of a law that calls on school systems to educate any child, anywhere within their district.

 "When you challenge them, they step up," says Cassy Lee, SLJ’s 2018 Champion of Student Voice. Lee is the middle school learning center coordinator at the Chinese American International School (CAIS) in San Francisco, the oldest Chinese-English dual language school in the United States. In 2015, CAIS opened a new middle school campus that is separate from the elementary school. Lee came on as the facility’s first dedicated librarian for the 125 sixth through eighth graders who are nearly equally fluent in English and Mandarin Chinese.

A practice known as "shared book reading" — engaging children by pointing to pictures, discussing word meanings, and the sequence of events in a book during one-on-one or small-group settings — has widely been presumed to boost language growth for English-learners. Now, a new analysis from researchers at Florida State University of more than 50 reading studies has determined that to be true.

Florence Phillips was born in New York to Jewish parents who fled Europe before the Holocaust. Growing up, she experienced first-hand the burden of being a child of immigrants who didn't speak English. Helping her parents interact with the outside world fell on her shoulders. For most of her life, Phillips worked various desk jobs. Then, in her late-50s, she enlisted in the Peace Corps. After returning to the US in 1999, at age 69, Phillips realized there were countless people in her own backyard in need of her support.

Omolara Uwemedimo says it's hard to imagine what her parents, who immigrated to New York from Nigeria decades ago, would have done if they had had to choose between food stamps and getting their green cards. Now other immigrants could be faced with that kind of choice. The Trump administration is considering penalizing legal immigrants for using government benefits such as Medicaid and food stamps and recently signaled in a public notice that it plans to propose new regulations.

Since the Seal of Biliteracy was introduced in California earlier this decade, its popularity has surged across the country, with nearly every state scrambling to offer special recognition for high school graduates who demonstrate fluency in two or more languages. Just six years later, students in 43 states and the District of Columbia can earn statewide or district-level recognition noting their skills in more than one language.

As students enter college this fall, many will hunger for more than knowledge. Up to half of college students in recent published studies say they either are not getting enough to eat or are worried about it. This food insecurity is most prevalent at community colleges, but it's common at public and private four-year schools as well.