ELL News Headlines

 "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.

In this column, Julio Ernesto Acuña García, a professor at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (Ecuador) writes, "Gang violence and expanding criminal networks have made El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala —an area of Central America known as the “Northern Triangle”– some of the world’s most dangerous countries...Children in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala are in so much danger that crossing a thousand miles of Mexico —a journey during which 60 percent of women and girls will be assaulted physically, sexually or both— apparently seems like a better bet."

When Jerry Gomez-Delgado thinks back to his first year at California State University, Fresno, he remembers how close he was to dropping out and going to work on a dairy farm with his father. Some days it seemed like the only thing that kept him from quitting was a free peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich. Gomez-Delgado recalls how help from the university’s College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) allowed him to survive. The federal program, created in 1972 to help children of agricultural workers succeed once they get to college, held workshops on how to cook and counseled Gomez-Delgado on how to pick a roommate, how to interact with his professors and how to apply for a desperately needed part-time job. But most of all, he remembers the free sandwiches.

25 young girls visiting from Osaka Takii High School in Japan are attending English as a Second Language (ESL) classes and activities at Regent Park Public School in Orillia, Canada until the end of this month. “There are many beautiful places and I like English,” said Harumi Matsumoto, talking about Canada. “It's more natural places here than in Japan. The food is delicious. The people are very kind.” Their days consist of learning English during the morning and applying their learning in activities during the second half of the day, explained Peggy Seko, Program coordinator for Muskoka Language International (MLI), through which the exchange program is run.

A federal judge in Bridgeport Friday found the Trump administration’s separation of two immigrant children, now detained in Connecticut, from their parents at the U.S.- Mexico border to be unconstitutional.