ELL News Headlines

Have you ever considered what might be going in the mind of someone who happens to be multilingual? Modern research continues to point to the fact that individuals who speak more than one language have a tremendous advantage. The brain becomes permanently shaped and influenced by the addition of an extra language, but is that where it stops?

An unusual partnership played out last week when students in the Playful Puppeteers Club from Churchill School in Schaumburg set up their stage and puppets in front of Opera in Focus, a professional puppet theater in Rolling Meadows. The young puppeteers from Schaumburg are all English Learner students, whose participation in the club strengthens their language and reading skills, as well as their self-confidence and teamwork, their teachers said.

When Jakari Singleton heard his school might lose its librarian, he went right to the source to confirm the news. "He said, 'Is this true?'" says Mindy Burns, who has been the teacher-librarian at Fryelands Elementary School in Monroe, WA, since it opened 13 years ago. When Burns informed Jakari that, yes, the district was in fact considering eliminating her position and others, the 11-year-old told her, "I'm going to save your job.'"

Did you know that kids growing up in poverty hear 30 million fewer words by age 3? Chances are, if you're the type of person who reads a newspaper or listens to NPR, you've heard that statistic before. But did you know that the number comes from just one study, begun almost 40 years ago, with just 42 families? That some people argue it contained a built-in racial bias? Or that others, including the authors of a brand-new study that calls itself a "failed replication," say it's just wrong? NPR talked to eight researchers on all sides to explore this controversy.

As Rhode Island's population of English Language learners continues to grow, some districts, including Providence, Central Falls and South Kingstown, are partnering with local colleges to fast track this training to put more teachers in the pipeline.

Janet Damon, Ed.S, MLSIS, is the library services specialist for Denver Public Schools.  In this blog post about a pop-up library she helped create at a Denver high school, she writes, "I then asked, 'How many of you had a library in elementary school?' More than half raised their hands. ‘How many of you had a library in middle school?’ Only three hands were still raised—and this school, as the principal noted, has no high school library. This predominately Hispanic and African American community doesn’t have librarians to help them connect to books—and most kids don't have the devices to read ebooks on from our digital collection. This situation creates a systemic problem: I believe that implicit bias creates a belief that students of color don’t care about reading. Students often internalize this negative belief."

In response to questions about policies of separating immigrant families at the border, as well as to reports about immigrant children who are unaccounted for by the Department of Health and Human Services, The New York Times has put together a Q&A. Read more in NPR and The Washington Post.

Democratic members of Congress are pushing back against a proposal from U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos' that would scrap the federal office that guides education policy and practice for millions of English-language-learner and immigrant students. The lawmakers want DeVos to rethink a proposal that would consolidate her department's office English-language acquisition into the broader office for elementary and secondary education.

Esteban Pastor hoped U.S. Border Patrol agents would free him and his 18-month-old son after they were arrested for crossing the southern border illegally last summer. He had mortgaged his land in Guatemala to fund his sick toddler's hospital stay, and needed to work in the United States to pay off the loan. Instead agents imprisoned the 28-year-old in July for coming back into the country after having been deported, a felony. They placed the toddler in a federal shelter, though where, Pastor didn't know. Three months later, in October, the father was deported — alone. His child, he said agents told him, was "somewhere in Texas."

Gov. John Carney (D) recently signed an executive order creating the Advisory Council on English Learners.  The group will track the state's progress on the English Learner Strategic Plan released by the Carney Administration in December.