ELL News Headlines

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.

New York Times book reviewer Elizabeth Wein writes, "Last year, during a visit to a school in Birmingham, England, I met a seventh grader who told me he had traveled there from Syria as a refugee. I wasn't equal to imagining what that journey was like. Yet here was this rosy-cheeked boy in a British school uniform, clearly a survivor, sitting in on my author event along with 150 other interested students. I tried to respond. 'You must be …' Brave? Resourceful? Determined? I struggled for an appropriate word. The boy filled in the gap himself. 'Unstoppable!' he pronounced triumphantly. And 'unstoppable' is the word that best fits the fictional children in three timely, poignant and sometimes tragic new novels describing the current global refugee crisis."

 "Young Children in the Digital Age: A Parent's Guide," is a new primer written by Nancy Carlsson-Paige, an early-childhood education expert, who has spent decades advocating for allowing young children learn through play.

This articles looks at some of the myths around bilingualism, as well as the facts that researchers have confirmed.

NPR's Audie Cornish speaks with former first lady Michelle Obama about her new book Becoming. Cornish and Obama are joined in the conversation by three young women from Obama's high school in Chicago.

Robert Worth is a New York Times journalist who has visited Yemen many times during his reporting career. After his last visit in August, he writes in this in-depth piece, "The ongoing war in Yemen has turned much of the country into a wasteland and has killed at least 10,000 civilians, mostly in errant airstrikes. The real number is probably much higher, but verifying casualties in Yemen’s remote areas is extremely difficult. Some 14 million people are facing starvation, in what the United Nations has said could soon become the worst famine seen in the world in 100 years. Disease is rampant, including the world’s worst modern outbreak of cholera."

Are all politics local? The adage fits here in Michael Siraguse's two AP Government classes, where students are peppering their teacher with post-midterm questions about the city council race. The discussion about elections is not just part of the classroom curriculum – in the past year, Siraguse has helped register about 1,000 of his students to vote. One first-time voter, Jaime Trejo-Angeles, credits his teacher's instruction with increasing student engagement around voting. "He really drives the point home and gets really into detail and depth, where other teachers just read from the textbook," Trejo-Angeles says. When asked how voting for the first time felt, Trejo-Angeles reports, "I had a sense of adrenaline just walking into there."