ELL News Headlines

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo is a finalist for the National Book Award. Della Farrell of School Library Journal writes, "Magnificently crafted, Acevedo's bildungsroman in verse is a stunning account of a teen girl's path to poetry. Sophomore Xiomara Batista is simultaneously invisible and hyper visible at home, at school, and in her largely Dominican community in Harlem — her body is 'unhide-able' she tells readers early on, and she bristles at how others project their desires, insecurities, failures, and patriarchal attitudes toward her…. Acevedo's poetry is skillfully and gorgeously crafted, each verse can be savored on its own, but together they create a portrait of a young poet sure to resonate with readers long after the book's end." Read more from Xiomara in this interview with School Library Journal.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor says a passion for words and reading paved her way to the highest court in the country. She delivered that message recently at a Reading is Fundamental event here promoting literacy—and honoring her contributions to it, with her new children's book, Turning Pages: My Life Story. The book, aimed at 4- to 8-year-olds, describes how words riveted her, even before she could read. Lively family gatherings at Sotomayor's grandmother's New York City home quieted when Abuelita, her grandmother, shared poems about the island of Puerto Rico, "the tropical land our family had left behind." Sotomayor said she was transfixed by her grandmother's ability to "mesmerize the crowd, just with words," and her father's "poetry duels" with family members that demonstrated the power of the spoken word. To illustrate the book, Delacre integrated meaningful words and images — like Sotomayor's library card — into her work.

Write what you know, they say. It took Jarrett J. Krosoczka years to follow that advice, but the results are worth the wait. While his books have long been reader favorites, Hey, Kiddo – now a finalist for the National Book Award – reveals the author's maturity and depth. Working up the courage to revisit a painful childhood and adolescence wasn’t easy for Krosoczka. In a phone interview, he told SLJ that he's been thinking about penning a graphic memoir for years, but "every time I went to write the book, I would stop." Then, in a 2012 TED Talk about his development as an artist, Krosoczka opened up about his early years. For much of his childhood, his mother, Leslie, was incarcerated because of her heroin use, so his maternal grandparents stepped in to care for him. He didn’t know who his father was until he was in high school. The video went viral, and he realized that this "was a book I needed to write."

Three years ago, three colleagues in the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development teamed up to pilot a Facebook unit in a high school classroom mainly composed of Somali English language learners.  Recognizing the appeal of social media among adolescents, Jenifer Vanek, Kendall King and Martha Bigelow — three instructors at the U of M specializing in second language acquisition — decided to investigate how it might be used to support English literacy development in the classroom. Their findings were recently published in the Journal of Language, Identity and Education. "There are so many discourses that are about skills that they don't have," said King, noting that those who are new to working with this student population often express surprise over the fact that they need to cover basics like how to properly hold a pencil. "In our work with them, all the time, we could see they were so sophisticated in using their phones, and using whatever device they had. There are all these skills we could maybe leverage."

Rachel Martin talks to Tomie dePaola about his new children's book, Quiet. He lives in the countryside and while dining at a local restaurant, he was particularly struck by a family he noticed there.

Hurricane Michael, the strongest storm to hit the Florida Panhandle in decades, slammed into the state on Wednesday afternoon and left a trail of destruction in its wake as it made its way to Georgia. Several Florida schools were being used as shelters on Wednesday, and some schools appeared to have sustained serious damage.

Imagine a small, developing nation whose education system is severely lacking: schools are poorly funded, students can't afford tuition or books, fewer than half of indigenous girls even attend school — and often drop out to take care of siblings or get married. These are the schools of rural Guatemala. Now meet a firebrand educator who thinks he has a way to reinvent those schools by focusing on the whole child.

Puerto Rico's students and teachers are still grappling with fallout from Hurricane Maria more than a year after the storm struck the island. So what do we know about the extent of trauma in the U.S. territory's schools, and what resources are being brought to bear to help them? 

Like his ancestors, 65-year-old Clayton Long spent his childhood immersed in Navajo culture, greeting fellow clan members with old, breathful Navajo words like "Yá'át'ééh." Then he was sent to an English-only boarding school where his native language, also known as Diné, was banned. "I went into a silent resistance," Long says from his home in Blanding, Utah. He vowed that he would help to preserve it after he left, work he has done for about three decades as a teacher. This week, he’s entering new territory on that mission: the app store. Long is one of the educators working with language-learning startup Duolingo on the company’s latest endeavor: using its popular app to revive threatened languages. On Oct. 8, celebrated in some places as Indigenous People's Day, Duolingo will launch courses in both Navajo and Hawaiian, two of the estimated 3,150 languages that face doubts about their long-term survival.

A new U.S. Department of Education report found that states are struggling to meet their academic targets for English-language learners in mathematics and reading. "The Biennial Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Title III State Formula Grant Program" found that just five states met their goals for helping English-language learners make progress in learning the language and reaching academic targets in mathematics and reading during the 2013-14 school year, the most recent year for which data was submitted.