ELL News Headlines

Encouraging Latinx adolescents of Mexican origin to embrace their ethnic pride, cultural values, and connections to their cultural community contributes to positive development and better adjustment during adolescence, a new University of California, Davis, psychology study suggests.

Back in her early days of teaching, Rebecca Bergey thought it was her job as a teacher of English learners to prepare her students with enough language to survive in content area classes. But as Bergey — now a principal researcher at the nonprofit American Institutes for Research — grew in her teaching, she realized that language learning operates at a systems level.

At P.S. 249 in Brooklyn, New York, over 20 percent of the students are English as a New Language (ENL) learners, many of them newcomers to the U.S. The school’s diverse population includes children who speak Spanish, Haitian Creole, Arabic, Urdu, Bengali, Ukrainian, and Georgian, and many start kindergarten with little or no English. When principal Elisa Brown first came on board in 2000, the school was using a pull-out model to serve these learners. She quickly noticed that by the time students were picked up from their various classrooms and brought to the specialized language learning teacher, they were getting minimal instruction time—maybe 10 minutes per day. And often, what they were learning was not connected to what was being taught in their regular classroom. 

Iveth Díaz has spent much of her career helping undocumented immigrant students navigate college. But when her own application to renew her work permit and temporary protection from deportation was delayed because of backlogs, she had to resign from her job for three months.

Two years ago, Stephanie Wright and Tyler Sumpter were part of the next generation of Native teachers. Graduates of the University of Oregon’s Sapsik’ʷałá master’s program, they respectively began their careers as educators at schools in Washington and Oregon.

Researchers have found kindergarten through third grade classes spend, on average, 89 minutes a day on English language arts, 57 minutes a day on math — and just 18 minutes a day on science. One way advocates are trying to encourage more science time? Adding outdoor classrooms to elementary schools.

Beth Barkley thought she was attending a ceremony for International Day of the Girl on Wednesday. The high school English teacher stood in the library at Cardozo Education Campus as the city’s mayor explained the importance of attaining “educational equity across genders.” But, in a ceremony focused mostly on her, Barkley learned that she had been named D.C’s 2024 Teacher of the Year.

Middle school students have a wide range of vocabulary knowledge. Many have developed a depth of knowledge from reading, verbal communication, and previous educational experiences, but some students lack the vocabulary skills needed to understand grade-level content.

Spring 2024 Scholastic Book Fairs will integrate books that were controversially separated out this fall in a now-discontinued elementary school collection of titles related to diversity and LGBTQ+ issues, the company has announced. The company has also enhanced its online title previews, saying they’ve become necessary to help educators navigate around state and local curriculum restrictions.

As part of a new program, every third grader in Albuquerque Public Schools spends a day at the Los Padillas Wildlife Sanctuary just outside the city. There, a wide variety of local landscapes are packed into five acres: a meadow, piñon, juniper and cottonwood trees, an arroyo and even a pond — a rarity in the desert. The sanctuary borders the black mesas to the west and to the east and the Rio Grande bosque — a term for a forest near a river bank. To the south is the Pueblo of Isleta, one of New Mexico’s many Native American communities: There are 19 different sovereign Pueblos, plus Apache and Navajo communities, across the state.